


Invite Me In for the Thousandth Time

by iamawilderness



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Angst, Banter, Bisexual Jessica Jones, Bisexuality, F/F, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Getting Back Together, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Heroism, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Jessica Jones season 3, Justice for Trish Walker, Morality, Murder, Redemption, Superheroes, Two assholes who love each other, alternate ending - Jessica Jones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2020-06-27 15:24:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 21,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19793677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamawilderness/pseuds/iamawilderness
Summary: If you, like me, love certified hot mess Trish Walker and thought she got a raw fucking deal in the finale, this one's for you. Begins partway through Season 3 Episode 12 (A.K.A. A Lotta Worms) and quickly diverges from there.Or, Jessica trying to save Trish's soul, even though she hardcore doesn't believe in the whole redemption thing.(Title is from "Invite Me In" by Wild Ones.)





	1. The Cold Inside

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“He’s just trying to help you,” Jess says. “We all are.”_
> 
> _“’We’?”_
> 
> _Jessica sits on the floor a few feet away from her, far enough so the chains can’t reach, and looks her dead in the eyes. “I am. And I always will. You goddamn stubborn prick.”_

Trish wakes to a soft surface beneath her, and a dull pain in her lower back. Where is she? Where’s Jess? More importantly, where’s _Sallinger_? She had him. _They_ had him. It was all going to work out. Jess would see reason, and they’d take him down together, and everything would finally fall into place for her. For _them._ They’d be the team they were always meant to be.

She finally musters the will to open her eyes, and is greeted by harsh sunlight leaking through dirty windows. Hadn’t it been nighttime? She’s forcibly reminded of long-ago mornings, waking up after a long, foggy night of benzos and champagne to brutal, unforgiving daylight and a stranger’s arm pinning her to the bed. But this is different. Her mind is clear. She’s in control. Isn’t she? 

Trish sits up, wincing against the ache in her back (man, she really wishes she’d gotten super healing), and finds herself staring at the walls of her own apartment. The place where she’s honed herself to a fine point — into a hero. Swift, efficient, strong. The place that Dorothy hated more than the off-brand Jimmy Choos a stylist had tried to pawn off on her before the Teen Choice Awards. _Dorothy._ Dorothy whose mutilated body she had seen only a few days before, empty eyes staring unseeingly back at her, her face a rictus of horror. Her mother. Who is gone. Whose killer and tormentor is still out there, no thanks to…

“Everything is out of reach, so don’t try anything.”

 _Jess._ Trish turns to see her best friend, her partner, her betrayer, slouched against the wall, clutching a mostly empty bottle of Heaven Hill, her leather jacket discarded on the floor beside her.

“What?” Trish says dumbly, woozy brain trying to catch up to her situation. She makes to stand but hisses in surprise when she finds that her right leg won’t budge. Her ankle is lashed to a steel I-beam by the same chains she uses in her workout routine, still stained red with her blood, her effort. And she is a cornered animal, shouting and stomping and yanking futilely at her restraints. “Shit. Shit. _Shit!_ ”

“Trish.” Jess hasn’t bothered to stand up, and Trish doesn’t know if that’s because she’s defeated or because she’s drunk. Probably a little of both. Or a lot.

Trish doesn’t answer Jessica’s unasked question as she pulls at the chains, grasping for purchase, desperate for escape. “Let me go. You need to let me go. Now.”

“Why? So you can commit more second-degree murder?” Jess counters.

“So I can do what you’re too weak to do,” Trish spits back, going straight for the jugular almost second nature at this point. She is already amped up with adrenaline, high on her own supply, which makes her feel better and clearer than the Benzedrine ever did. She sits on the ground and unzips her right boot, flush with determination.

“Trish, I’m sorry about Dorothy. You know I am. But this has to stop. _You_ have to stop.” There’s a ragged, sandpaper edge to Jessica’s voice that tells Trish she’s been up all night, hasn’t slept, hasn’t eaten, hasn’t drank anything but bourbon. And that old instinct rises to the surface, under all the righteous rage: Care for her. Protect her. Save her, even when she can’t save herself.

She thinks back to long-ago mornings post-Kilgrave, Jess barely able to move, curled like a shrimp in the far corner of Trish’s bed. She thinks back to two days before, Jess so tender as she rinsed her mother’s blood from Trish’s hands, as she draped her black hoodie around Trish’s shoulders and gently guided her to bed. _I chose you._

She has to make Jessica understand: She’s the strong one now. Her mother’s death hasn’t broken her, it has galvanized her. Trish can do this for both of them now. Jessica can finally rest. She willl protect Jess, but she also won’t let her stand in the way of what she has to do. “I can’t stop. I won’t,” Trish says finally, attempting to maneuver the chain around her ankle.

Across the room, Jess scoffs loudly.

“What.”

Jessica shakes her head and takes a quick pull of whiskey. “That’s the same thing you said to me the day before you OD'd.” Because, wow, Jess knows how to go for the jugular, too. When Trish doesn’t take the bait, she continues: “Patsy Walker, always so convinced of her own righteousness. Her own goodness. Right up until it bites her in the ass.” Jess stands on wobbly legs.

“Don’t,” Trish mutters.

“When’s it gonna stop, Trish? How many people have to die?”

Trish grunts in frustration as the chain fails to slip around her sock. She ignores Jessica’s question and instead asks one of her own. “So who’d you get to knock me out while you were busy _not_ killing Sallinger? Erik?”

Jessica laughs mirthlessly and looks away. “Can’t let him near you. You give him too much of a headache now.”

“Bullshit. Erik gives himself a headache.”

“Whatever you gotta tell yourself to sleep at night.”

Trish vaults that particular hurdle and keeps going. She’s an acrobat now, after all. “Who, then?”

Jess throws her a half smirk and ambles toward the kitchen area. “Thought you’re a detective now too. You figure it out.”

She is, and it only takes her a moment to get there. “Malcolm. That little shit.”

Jess pulls a bottle of water from the fridge and lobs it toward Trish, who catches it effortlessly in her left hand. Underneath everything, Trish is still thrilled at her body’s new grace, wonders distantly if it’s made for anything other than carrying out executions.

“He’s just trying to help you,” Jess says. “We all are.” 

“’We’?”

Jessica sits on the floor a few feet away from her, far enough so the chains can’t reach, and looks her dead in the eyes. “ _I_ am. And I always will. You goddamn stubborn prick.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"During my worst year  
>  You caught every tantrum I threw  
> With your bare hands  
> Chucked it back at that blood moon  
> Said, it’s okay, everyone’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes."_
> 
> _– Andrea Gibson, "Angels of the Get-Through"_


	2. Spy vs. Spy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Malcolm sighs on the other end of the line. “Is this the best use of my…skills? You know you could literally just order delivery from Wok City, right?”_
> 
> _“Sure, but I’d prefer not to have to explain a Patsy Walker hostage situation to some poor schmuck from Seamless.”_

The headache that throbs behind Jessica’s temples has become a permanent fixture at this point, took up residence there on her first morning Kilgrave-free and has never really left. The least it could do, she reasons, is to pay rent.

But it grows a little worse each time she hears the jangle of chains, the rough metallic clatter of metal grinding against metal. _The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result._ By that measure, at least, Trish Walker is definitely insane.

Jess has been lying on the floor for God knows how long, ever since the whiskey started running low. And unlike Trish’s previous apartment, clean and vast and fortress-like, this one doesn’t come with a shelf stocked just for Jess’s particular addictions.

“Trish,” she growls through clenched teeth. “Will you just…fucking…”

The chains stop rattling long enough for Trish to reply, in a tone that’s far more businesslike than she has any right to be in this moment, “Let me go, and this can all be over.” When Jess dignifies that with the lack of response it deserves, the clanking starts anew. This, Jess thinks, must’ve been how Ebenezer Scrooge felt when the first bell chimed. _But was Marley ever such a stubborn asshole?_

They’ve been at a stalemate for hours, Jessica resolute and Trish unrelenting in her demand to be set free so she could go carry out her fucked-up version of vigilante justice. Beyond the headache, beyond the rattling of the chains, Jess struggles to recall a time before — before Sallinger, before _both_ their mothers’ deaths, before Malus and Simpson and fucking _Kilgrave,_ when Trish had been something so solid and kind and _good,_ before the world had done to her and she’d done right back.

But no, that isn’t right. Trish had never been just okay, just steady, just good. Neither had Jess. That’s part of why they worked so well together, in spite of everything else: They were both a goddamn mess, whether it was Jess picking Trish up off the floor of a nightclub bathroom, her pupils blown wide with whatever she’d lately snorted, or Trish catching Jess before her body hit the rug, crusted in blood that maybe her own or maybe somebody else’s, or maybe both.

Either way, no matter how life pulled them apart or thrust them back together, they always had each other’s backs, ever since that distant day when Jessica tossed Dorothy Walker out the bathroom door like a rag doll. Dorothy who is now dead and gone, thanks to a man who has no right to walk this is earth but who will, for the sake of both their souls, remain alive and breathing. At least, if Jess has anything to say about it. And she has plenty. But right now, in this exact moment, she is just so fucking exhausted. Not to mention…

“Jess.” Trish, by some miracle, has stopped rattling her chains, and it’s enough for Jess to lift her head the barest inch off the floor. “Jess. I’m hungry.”

Jess lets her head fall back to the concrete. “Should’ve thought of that before you started playing Spy vs. Spy.”

“Jess. Come on.”

Even after all these years and disasters, it still kills Jessica just a little how delicious that single syllable still sounds on Trish’s lips. _Jess._ As if her name could be a holy word. Even now, in her grief-laced sociopathy, Trish still has the power to soothe something deep inside her, something that’s bristling and busted. Jess _has_ to pull her back from this brink. She’s the only one who can.

With a great groan, she peels herself from the cold concrete and lurches to the kitchen. “Alright, what’ve you got in here? Any of your macrobiotic crap or your kale whatevers?”

From her gym mat prison, Trish scoffs. “Please. I don’t have time for that stuff anymore.”

Jess goes for the cabinet over the sink and finds something that makes her snort out a laugh, in spite of the situation. She turns to display it to Trish with a theatrical eyebrow raise: a five-pound canister of Muscle Milk. “Seriously?”

“What? I need protein to bulk up!”

Jess rolls her eyes and slams it back on the shelf. “Okay, Rambo.”

Trish picks at one of the links of the chain. “You really need to update your pop culture references.”

“So not the main issue we’re dealing with right now.” Jess yanks her phone from the pocket of her discarded jacket and pulls up Malcolm’s number, a cut on her thumb catching on the cracked screen. (She would get it fixed, but it’ll just get broken again next week.)

Malcolm answers on the second ring, his voice too eager by half. _“How’s it going with her? You need me to get in there?”_

“A world of no. But do me a favor?”

_“As long as you’re still paying me, it’s not a favor.”_

“Two orders of General Tso’s, Kung Pao Beef, and a side of wontons from Wok City on 39th,” Jess rattles off.

Malcolm sighs on the other end of the line. _“Is this the best use of my…skills? You know you could literally just order delivery from Wok City, right?”_

“Sure, but I’d prefer not to have to explain a Patsy Walker hostage situation to some poor schmuck from Seamless.”

_“Ugh. Fine.”_

From across the room, Trish mutters something that’s too low to make out.

Jess cups her hand over the phone and says loudly, “I didn’t catch that.”

Trish stares daggers at her and hisses, “I said: and an order of spring rolls.”

“You’ll get spring rolls if you quit the David Blaine routine,” Jess replies, with a nod to her restraints. In response, Trish stamps one foot hard against the mat to make the chains rattle.

Jess tosses her a filthy look before putting the phone to her ear once more. “And an order of spring rolls. …And, god, a bottle of whiskey.”

_“I assumed the whiskey was implied.”_

“See? This is why I’m glad we’re working together again,” Jess deadpans.

_“I’ll be there in half an hour. You owe me, Jessica.”_

“When don’t I?” She hangs up without saying goodbye.

Trish leans back against the pillar, a marked improvement over the prolonged escape attempt. “You’re working with Malc again, huh?”

“Ugh, please don’t call him _Malc._ And yeah. I needed all hands on deck for this one.”

Trish laughs coldly. “For what? Operation save my soul?”

Jess returns to her post on the floor, too weary to stand any longer than is strictly necessary. She polishes off the last of the Heaven Hill now that she knows a resupply is on the way. “Something like that.”

It’s nighttime again — Jessica doesn’t bother to check precisely how late — and Trish’s spartan apartment is bathed in moonlight, casting Trish in a blue glow that makes her look ethereal. Or drowned. The silence stretches between them like a cat in the dark. Jess has no idea where they go from here.

Trish surprises her when she says, quietly but clearly, “You know I always want spring rolls.”

And that — that one passing comment — is enough to ignite a tiny match flare of hope in Jessica’s chest, that the old Trish is still in there somewhere. Trish who would stay up with her for hours when she couldn’t sleep watching old reruns of _Magnum, P.I.,_ even though neither of them liked it very much. Trish who had split more takeout meals with Jess than she could ever begin to count, over the many years of their fucked-up lives together. Trish who took care of them when Jess couldn’t take care of herself. Trish who thought a hero was someone who at least tried to be good. Trish from back before the world shattered her, or she shattered herself, or whatever.

Jess smiles a little, a real one, and lets Trish see it. “I know you do,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Someone I loved once gave me  
>  a box full of darkness._
> 
> _It took me years to understand  
>  that this, too, was a gift."_
> 
> _–Mary Oliver, "The Uses of Sorrow"_


	3. Spring Rolls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What Trish wants more than anything is to convince Jessica to come around to her way of thinking, to open her eyes to the harsh realities of good and evil, so they can come together and be the avenging duo they were always meant to be. Ooh, they could call themselves…_ The Avengers.
> 
> _It’s only a moment after Trish has this particularly stupid thought that she barks out a laugh at her own idiocy._

“Jess, this is humiliating.”

“It’s called  _ consequences, _ Trish. Figured you’d be familiar with that concept from rehab.”

“At least turn around.”

“And have you do some kind of wackadoo Black Widow backflip and knock me out? I’m thinking no.”

“This sucks.”

“Just get it over with, or we’re switching to my bucket idea.”

“I don’t even  _ have  _ a bucket.”

“ _ Now  _ who’s not planning ahead?”

“You’re really just gonna…”

Jess raises an eyebrow. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Trish sighs hugely and finally just sits down on the toilet and friggin’ pees already, even though Jess is standing sentry right in front of her like a prison guard. Pretty much literally a prison guard, actually.

It’s true, though. Jess had seen Trish in all manner of compromising positions, though not for many years and not in any way they ever talk about. That still doesn’t make this experience any less demeaning. As she pulls up her pants, Trish’s eyes scan the room, seeking potential escape routes. Trish wonders if she moved fast enough, if she could make it out the…

“You can’t, so don’t even try,” Jess cuts through her thoughts.

“I can’t what?”

“Make it out the window before I stop you.”

“That’s not what I was…”

“Yes, it was.”

Yes, it was. But Trish isn’t about to give Jess the benefit of knowing she can still read her like an open-and-shut case file. Besides, there’s plenty Jess doesn’t know about Trish now. The rush of doing a running flip off a wall. The high of dropping ten stories and landing gracefully on her feet. The satisfaction of feeling Jace Montero’s skull fracture beneath her fists. The cold thrill of knowing she has the power to take a bad person out of the world, permanently, with only her bare hands.

But Jess is right about one thing: This isn’t the moment for Trish to make her bid for freedom, not with Jessica still on high alert (or as high as her alert gets with that much bourbon in her system). And besides, she’s not interested in this game of cat and mouse they’ve found themselves playing, Jess always one step ahead of her plans. What Trish wants more than anything is to convince Jessica to come around to her way of thinking, to open her eyes to the harsh realities of good and evil, so they can come together and be the avenging duo they were always meant to be. Ooh, they could call themselves… _ The Avengers. _

It’s only a moment after Trish has this particularly stupid thought that she barks out a laugh at her own idiocy.

“What the hell now?” Jess says as she finishes re-securing the chain to the pillar. She looks genuinely concerned, like she’s losing Trish.  _ Oh, Jess. If only I could make you understand. I’ve finally been found. _

“Nothing. I’m…”

“Certifiable?” Jess shoots her another worried glance before turning away pacing the room, big boots clomping against the concrete. It’s at moments like these that Trish misses her area rug.

Jess glances at her phone. “Ugh. Where the hell is Malcolm?”

As if on cue, there’s a banging on the apartment door. Trish isn’t sure if she’s ready to deal with Malcolm and whatever moral compass he’s decided to adopt this week, but she’s definitely ready to deal with those spring rolls.

“Stay,” Jess mutters as she stands to go to the door. 

“I’m not a dog, Jess,” Trish shoots back.

Malcolm enters, toting fragrant bags of food that’s surely laden with levels of MSG that Trish would’ve balked at even a year ago. Trish 2.0, however, can’t be bothered with dietary niceties.

“Looks like you’ve made some real progress here,” Malcolm deadpans, taking in the sight of the chained-up, semi-feral Trish.

“Shut up,” Jess says, relieving him of the bags.

Trish clocks Malcolm’s new (old) look. Gone is the bespoke suit and look of cold determination; in its place, a leather moto jacket and eyes full of moral quandaries. “Moved on from covering bad people’s tracks for Hogarth, I see?” she says.

“Back on the old payroll. Now I just tase them for Jess,” he replies. 

So it was a taser. Trish feels the answering sting in her lower back. “Are you calling me a bad person?”

His expression softens. “I’m calling you someone who needs help, Trish. We’ve all been there.” His eyes dart over to Jessica, who is unpacking the Chinese takeout boxes on the desk in grim silence.

Jess slides one of the boxes to Trish and grabs Malcolm by the arm. “Can we talk? Over here?” She yanks him into the corner by the door.

“No chopsticks?” Trish shouts over to them.

“No opportunities to make improvised weapons, no,” Jess says.

Trish watches them against the wall, whispering low over her fate — two people who clearly care about her, but fundamentally misunderstand her. And meanwhile, while they’re bickering and Trish is eating dim sum, Sallinger is still  _ out there,  _ doing God knows what to God knows who. She bites into a spring roll, and the wet-skin feel of the rice wrap between her fingers makes her think of death, of corpses, of her mother’s body in ruins, her blood staining Trish’s hands, her…

_ No.  _ Trish retches, and the uneaten bit of spring roll falls back into the carton. Jessica and Malcolm both turn at the sound. 

“Trish…” Jess begins.

“I’m fine. Just...not as hungry as I thought.”

Jess gives her that look again — that look like she might shatter — then resumes whispering urgently to Malcolm. By the time Trish has managed to force down a spring roll, the two of them seem to be winding down their conversation.

“You sure you’re up for this?” Jess says as they break apart.

“Are  _ you _ ?” Malcolm parries.

“Care to fill me in?” Trish tries, even though she knows they won’t. She’s an outsider now, for better or worse. She doesn’t miss Jess calling all the shots, but she does miss the warm glow of being part of the inner circle. (Powered or not, she’s only human.)

“Looks like I’m gonna be babysitting you for awhile,” Malcolm says, leaning against the table.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Yeah, you do,” Jessica says.

“Jess, are you going to —”

Jess cuts her off at the pass. “I’m going to go take care of something, and it’s none of your damn business, Trish.”

Trish translates  _ none of your damn business  _ to  _ Gregory Sallinger,  _ who is most definitely her business. But even in her current state, Trish knows that there’s no steering Jess away from her misguided idea of what a “hero” is. She’s too weak to do what needs to be done. But then a voice, small but clear, in the back of her mind whispers:  _ Jessica Jones is the strongest person you’ve ever known.  _ Trish leans back against the column and tries not to vomit up what little food she’s managed to choke down. She doesn’t know what strong is anymore. So instead she says: “Be careful.”

Jess smiles a little, sadly, and replies, “You know me.”

All of this feels wrong. Trish should have Jess’s back, like she always has, ever since they were kids. But their MOs are fundamentally at odds now.

Jess shrugs on her jacket like the armor that it is and says to the room at large, “Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll be back…” She trails off, as if the very concept of time has failed her, along basically with everyone else in her life. “I’ll be back.”

It’s only after she’s left that Trish realizes Jess never touched her Kung Pao beef. “She forgot to eat,” she says.

Malcolm, to her surprise, snickers at that. “The two of you, I swear. One minute you’re beating the shit out of each other, and the next…”

“What?”

He smirks. “Nothing. I’ll put it in the fridge.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Artemis lying beside dead Orion sees her past changed by a single act. The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was. Every action and decision has led her here. The moment has been waiting the way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleepwalker. She has fallen and now she is awake."_
> 
> _– Jeanette Winterson, "Sexing the Cherry"_


	4. Dicked Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Trish looks away. “Well, like you said — it’s over. Sallinger’s in jail. You can let me go now.”_
> 
> _Jessica and Malcolm, who has been curiously silent since Jess walked in, exchange a long look. Jess turns and offers her a tight-lipped grimace. “No, I can’t.”_
> 
> _“You can’t be serious.”_
> 
> _“No! You’re not okay. In the last three days, you’ve lost your mother,_ killed two people, _and tried to kill another. And now you want to, what, get up and dust yourself off and go shoot an episode of_ Style by Trish _?”_
> 
> _Well, when she puts it like that…_

It’s no surprise that Malcolm proves to be a chatty jailer, but boy, does he make remorse look exhausting. The old Trish, the one who hosted a radio show and had a genuine and abiding interest in getting to know the people she interviewed, would have taken careful measure of this man and his tired eyes, his abiding ability to lie to himself, and spun it into human-interest-story gold. Hell, maybe she would’ve even fallen into bed with him (again) after all was said and done.

But right now, as the hours tick away and Jessica is nowhere to be found and Sallinger prowls the streets with his suitcases full of human remains, she could not give two wet shits about Malcolm and whatever come-to-Jesus moment he seems interested in sharing with her. Trish already met Jesus, in rehab, eleven years ago. Didn’t exactly find him compelling.

Still, she does what she used to do best: tries to make herself clear, understood, empathetic, relatable. She tells him the story of how she got her dear old dad (the prick) sent to jail, years before Jessica Jones or _It’s Patsy!_ came into her life. Or rather, were brought into her life by her mother, who always did know how to make things happen.

“Generating change in the world, being effective — it’s a powerful drug. But it is not easy,” Trish tells Malcolm. _I sound completely reasonable,_ she thinks, rattling off the names of the three human beings she has wiped off the face of the earth. She tries not to think of the blood, the broken bones, the gunshots, the look of burning rage on Jessica’s face when she leapt down from that ferris wheel at Playland.

 _Make him understand._ “Malcolm, the things I’ve done…” She trails off. “You’re right. It wasn’t me. The old me. But as long as Sallinger and other assholes like him are out there, I don’t know if I can get her back. And I’m not sure that I should.”

Malcolm opens his mouth to speak, but they’re interrupted by approaching footsteps that make Trish’s breath hitch in her throat. And when at last Jessica strides through the door, her face fixed in a grimace and a bleeding gash along her hairline, Trish _is_ the old her. Because all she wants to do is take her friend into her arms, inspect her for worse damage beneath the skin, wrap her wounds, tuck her beneath a blanket with an ice pack and a fond smile. It surprises Trish how rapidly she switches to caregiver mode, always, even now, where Jessica is concerned. 

Trish doesn’t know what to believe when Jess informs them both that it’s over, that Sallinger is behind bars and the photo of Trish in an act of interrupted annihilation has been destroyed. And Jess did all this...for what? For justice? For relief? For the idea of heroism that was born the moment Alisa Jones died? _No._ For her. Jess did it all for her. 

When she tosses Trish the photo, the one that bears Sallinger’s unmistakable aesthetic signature, Trish feels all the blood in her body atomize with outrage.

“It isn’t satisfying, it doesn’t take away the pain, and it doesn’t affect either of us, except that he's done,” Jess says.

But she’s wrong. She’s so wrong, and she’s lying to herself. Of _course_ it’s personal. Trish stares into Jess’s haunted, black-and-white eyes, her look of defeat artfully lit by Sallinger’s ring light, and a tear falls from her own. She feels the photo paper crinkle between her fingers. “But I’m so _angry,_ ” she chokes out. It’s the truest thing she knows.

“So am I,” Jess says, stoically, “But that’s the burden we have to carry.” She stands, feet planted, talking about burdens and strength, and Trish thinks of Luke, of that nut in the red cowl who disappeared under Manhattan, of Captain fucking America. Jess has become the hero Trish always knew she could be, except everything is different now. Because that’s not the kind of hero Trish wants or needs anymore.

Trish wads up the photo into a tight ball between her fists. “But I don’t want to _carry_ my anger. I want to _use_ my anger. It’s not a burden, Jess. It’s an _asset._ ”

Jess sighs and crouches down next to her and places a hand on her shoulder. “I know. And that’s why I am so fucking scared for you, Trish.”

Trish looks away. “Well, like you said — it’s over. Sallinger’s in jail. You can let me go now.”

Jessica and Malcolm, who has been curiously silent since Jess walked in, exchange a long look. Jess turns and offers her a tight-lipped grimace. “No, I can’t.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“No! You’re not okay. In the last three days, you’ve lost your mother, _killed two people,_ and tried to kill another. And now you want to, what, get up and dust yourself off and go shoot an episode of _Style by Trish_?”

Well, when she puts it like that…

“Christ, Trish. I may have historically been a shitty friend to you sometimes, but I’m not shitty enough to let you be alone right now.”

Trish lifts the chain in one hand. “Holding me hostage? That’s what friendship looks like to you?”

Jess crosses her arms and sighs. “In this case, yeah.” She turns to Malcolm. “You can head out. I can take it from here.”

Malcolm narrows his eyes at her. “Are you sure? When did you even sleep last?”

“None of your damn business.”

Malcolm chuckles and shrugs on his jacket. “It never is. Alright. Fine. Whiskey’s on the counter. Good luck with...whatever the fuck this is.”

And then he’s gone, and it’s just Trish, Jessica, and the unbridgeable divide that yawns between them. Jess pulls the fresh bottle of Jim Beam from the paper bag on the counter. “You got any highball glasses in this place, or is it exclusively a spartan solo gym?”

“Cabinet to the right of the fridge.” Trish schools herself to be calm, sound reasonable. “So, what now?”

Jess pours herself three fingers and gazes into the depths of the glass. “Malcolm’s right. I am pretty fucking tired.”

“Jess, what did he do to y —”

Jessica cuts her off abruptly. “Doesn’t matter. I’m alive, he’s in jail. And he’s gonna stay there.”

“He doesn’t deserve the air he’s breathing.” 

Jess rolls her eyes. “What does that even _mean,_ Trish? Do I _deserve_ the air I’m breathing? Do you? We’re all just taking up space on this miserable little rock.”

“You killed Kilgrave. How is this any different?”

Jess slams her glass down on the counter, hard enough to crack it. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“No. I’m asking you. How is Sallinger any different? He probably murdered more people than Kilgrave ever did.”

Jess squeezes the glass between her fingers, and this time it shatters. Trish’s heart skips.

“ _Because,_ Trish, I didn’t have a fucking _choice_ with Kilgrave, did I?” Jess advances toward her, eyes blazing. “Kilgrave had powers that meant he could never stand trial, never be jailed, never be held accountable for his actions, never be _stopped_ unless somebody put him down. And because the universe has a dicked-up sense of humor, that person had to be me.” A drop of red falls from her clenched fist.

“Jess. Your hand.”

Jess ignores her and presses on. “Gregory Sallinger, on the other hand, is just your garden-variety, non-powered, serial-killing dickwad. Get him on the right evidence, make sure it’s airtight, turn him over to the cops — all of which I _did_ — and he goes away. For good. He can’t mind-control his way out. Just a regular piece of shit in solitary confinement. He’s out of the goddamn picture, and that’s something I can live with.” She stops, taking a breath. “So yeah, Trish, it’s fucking different.”

“Easy for you to say. He didn’t kill your mother.” Trish realizes what she said as soon as it leaves her mouth.

Jess stops in her tracks. “No. _You_ did that.”

“Fuck. Jess. I’m —”

“Don’t.”

Trish shuts up, and a long, taut moment stretches across the space, neither of them moving. Then, Jessica does the very last thing Trish expects: She picks up the chain linking Trish to the support beam and breaks it in half. Trish looks up at her, stunned.

“I’m going to go sleep in your weird little loft. Do whatever the fuck you want. Escape, whatever. I am so beyond done trying to save you from yourself.”

Trish is frozen in place as Jessica swipes the Jim Beam from the counter, leaving the glass shards behind, and climbs the steps to Trish’s makeshift bedroom. A moment later, Trish hears the heavy flop of her friend’s body hitting the mattress.

And just like that, Trish is left to her own devices. Apparently, all it took to get herself free was to remind her best friend of the most terrible thing she’s ever done to her. Numbly, Trish loosens the chain from her ankle. She stretches her sore leg, slips her boots back on, and stands. She checks the clock on the wall. She could still make it to the evening taping of _Style by Trish_ if she hurries. No one would even know she’d been missing.

But to her own surprise, her feet take her precisely nowhere. What the hell is she doing? She’s put a torch to her own life, and the only person she cares about, who has forgiven her so many times, who has every reason to hate her for the things she’s done, once again put her own life and sanity on the line to save her. And now she’s upstairs, broken, exhausted, and righteously angry for the things that have been taken from her. For the things _Trish_ took from her.

Trish walks to the bathroom on stiff legs, flips the light on, and stares unblinkingly at her reflection in the mirror. Greasy hair, wild eyes, skincare regimen gone to utter seed. She’d told Malcolm she wasn’t interested in getting the old her back, which is true. But who is this new person she’s becoming?

By the time she’s splashed water on her face, brushed her teeth, and come back out to see if there’s still leftover Chinese in the fridge, she can hear Jess snoring softly in the loft. With a resigned sigh, Trish toes off her boots again. 

So, okay. Maybe she’ll miss the taping. Whatever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about."_
> 
> _– Haruki Murakami, "Kafka on the Shore"_


	5. Seeds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Talking’s for assholes, though.”_  
>    
> _Trish took a step closer, until she was in Jessica’s space. “That’s maybe the most inane thing you’ve ever said.”_
> 
> _Jess met her eyes. “Thereby proving my point.”_

Jessica Jones can’t recall a time when her life was simple, easy. She knows there must’ve been one, before the accident and everything that came after — the grief, and the powers, and Dorothy, and Patsy, and the anger, and the grief. But life’s piled too much shit on her since then, unending gobs of it, and anything before then feels like it happened to someone else.

So her life has never been simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s never been happy. But no, that’s not right either; _happy_ is too facile a word for the way that Trish Walker made her feel, in the past, in their better moments. Hell, even in their worse ones, like when Trish was puking up benzos in the bathroom and Jess was holding back her hair, telling her between heaves that this was the last time, _she swears._ Or after Kilgrave died the first time, when Jessica collapsed inside the threshold of Trish’s Tribeca loft, Reva Connors’s blood still drying on her knuckles, and Trish caught her up in gentle arms.

And then there were the times, few and precious, when they were both just fine, or at least as close as either of them got to whatever “fine” is. 

And look: Trish has never been her _sister._ Not really. Living under the same roof as someone after being adopted by her mother for cynical publicity reasons doesn’t make you kin — a fact which Dorothy herself made abundantly clear in the way she’d treated young Jess, like an impulse buy that had gone out of fashion but was still taking up space in her closet for some reason. 

It was made even more abundantly clear the blurry night when a teenaged Jessica and Trish swiped all the liquor from a hotel minibar on an _It’s Patsy!_ tour and wound up making out on the king-size bed — two teens with too much time on their hands and no supervision. In the morning, they both casually pretended it had never happened. So Trish and Jessica had grown up wrapped up in each other, at first by chance and later by choice, two orbiting galaxies warping each other’s gravitational fields. 

That night wasn’t brought up again until many years later, when they were sharing an apartment in the East Village rented by a newly liberated, newly sober Trish, after “I Want Your Cray Cray” but before _Trish Talk._ Trish had come home one night from a mediocre date with a mediocre man to find Jess a few beers deep on the sofa, staring at the TV as if it, and not the world at large, had wronged her.

“Come on. It’s never fucking lupus!” 

“I thought you hated that show.”

Jess turned at the sound of Trish’s voice. “Yeah, well. Beats the news.” She snapped off Hugh Laurie mid-diagnosis and sat up. “You’re home early. What’s-his-face not give you the ride of your life?”

Trish dropped her clutch on the kitchen counter and began to unburden herself of her jewelry. “Didn’t make it that far. He kept trying to grab my ass at the restaurant, and —”

Jessica was up in a shot. “Did he hurt you?”

“Jess. No. He was just kind of…”

“A tool? A douchebag? A top-shelf pervert?”

Trish laughed. “I was gonna say he was just kind of basic.”

“Oh.”

Trish smiled at Jess as her hackles lowered and she leaned back against the fridge. Trish’s face was flush with something, Jess thought, beyond the heat of the August night.

“You don’t always have to be so protective of me, y’know,” Trish said, unhooking her bra and pulling it off beneath her dress. “I can take care of myself.”

Jess didn’t say _You can now, maybe, but not long ago, you were putting yourself in bad situations on purpose._ But she sure as hell thought it. “Sure you can,” she muttered instead.

Trish rolled her eyes. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were jealous.”

Jessica froze for a few heartbeats too long at these words. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that new radio gig was giving you a big head, _Patsy._ ” She threw in that last hoping that the insult would mask what she was trying desperately not to say.

Trish tossed her bra on the couch, and her mouth curled into a smirk that scrambled something in Jessica’s brain. “‘Patsy’? Now I _know_ you’re jealous.”

Jess pushed herself back against the fridge, jostling a few magnets in the process. “I thought we didn’t talk about this.”

“We don’t. But we could.” Trish took a step forward. There was something feline in her movements that Jess had never noticed before.

“Talking’s for assholes, though.”

Trish took a step closer, until she was in Jessica’s space. “That’s maybe the most inane thing you’ve ever said.”

Jess met her eyes. “Thereby proving my point.”

Neither would be able to say for sure who moved first, but the fact was that in a matter of moments, Trish was pressed against Jess against the fridge, and they were kissing each other greedily, two star systems colliding and warping, and the magnets clattered to the floor. (Who had bought them so many fridge magnets, anyways?) Trish smelled like Mediocre Man’s piney cologne, but her mouth tasted like rainwater, like something Jess had been thirsty for her whole life.

So, yeah. Dorothy hadn’t been too far off the mark when she’d asked if the two of them were an item — she’d just shot about a decade wide.

But also, look: She and Trish had never been a _couple,_ per se. That was at once too large and too small a word for what they were to each other. They’d each had their flings, their boyfriends and girlfriends and late-night hookups and short-term disasters. But they’d always come back to each other in the end, falling into one or the other’s bed together, neither of them interested or willing to name the thing that had grown, was growing, between them. They were just Jess and Trish, Trish and Jess. They just _were._

But Kilgrave had taken a hatchet to what they were, annihilated Jessica’s entire sense of self for a good long time. By the time the dragon was slain and Jess and Trish had found something like equilibrium again, both were too wary, too damaged, to rekindle that old fire. And just as Jess was starting to get there again, that place on the outskirts of Okay, Trish had to go and blow up her life and go under Dr. Malus’s knife. 

And then she’d had to do the thing Jessica still hadn’t forgiven her for, not really. Even if she’d briefly entertained the deluded notion that they could become some kind of shitty superteam, even if the sight of Trish shattered in the wake of Dorothy’s death was enough to break what little Jess had left of a heart. Even if that stubborn sliver of heart still belonged to Trish, in spite of absolutely everything. 

Even if she knows, as she drifts from sleep to waking, stumbling out of the shadows of her memories, that she’ll open her eyes and find Trish gone, off murdering some murky-souled man or other and calling it justice, and the blood will be as much on Jess’s hands as on Trish’s, because she was exhausted and disgusted enough to let her go. 

But wait. Is that… Is that _bacon_?

Jess squints against the daylight and flinches at the sting in her right hand, the one that she'd smashed a glass with. She holds it up and finds her palm neatly bandaged. she presses her fingers to her hairline and finds a butterfly closure over the gash Sallinger had opened in her head. _What the hell?_ Jessica levers herself out of the bed and stumbles to the edge of the loft, where she's greeted by an unlikely sight: Trish, dressed in sweats and slippers, making pancetta and eggs over easy on the stove.

Trish turns before Jess has a chance to alert her to her presence; probably her enhanced cat senses or whatever the fuck. “Oh good, you’re up. You still like the yolks runny, right?”

For a long moment, Jessica is too stunned to answer. “Uh… Yeah?” she says finally.

“Figured. They’re almost ready. Come down and let’s eat. You can use my toothbrush if you want.”

“Trish, um…” Jess pinches the bridge of her nose, staving off a rising hangover. Or maybe it’s something else causing this enormous headache. “What the fuck?”

Trish smiles at her — really smiles — and it’s like the sun coming out after weeks of rain. “Let’s talk. Okay?”

Jessica’s mind races with questions, enough to multiply her headache sevenfold. How long had she been asleep? Did Trish somehow manage to find and kill Sallinger in his prison cell while Jess was conked out? Is that why she’s acting so goddamn Stepford-y all of a sudden? But Jess has been a P.I. long enough to know that there’s only one way out of a puzzle, and that’s through it. Plus, the pancetta smells really goddamn good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"I would like to be a dead dry thing," he muttered looking at the leaves scattered over the grass. "I would like to be a leaf blown away by the wind." He looked up and his eyes turned to where among the trees, we could see the lake in the distance. "I am weary and want to be made clean. I am a man covered by creeping crawling things. I would like to be dead and blown by the wind over limitless waters," he said. "I want more than anything else in the world to be clean."_
> 
> _– Sherwood Anderson, “Seeds”_


	6. Kicked Dog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Trish Walker will be the death of her. But then, she’s known that since she was fifteen._

“How’s your hand?”

Jessica doesn’t reply, only fixes Trish with a hard, unblinking stare across the steam rising from her breakfast, which Trish has briskly plated in front of her.

“You were conked out and it was still bleeding, so I wrapped it up with what I had in my first aid kit. Not that I care if you get blood on my sheets, and I know you heal fast, but —”

“Trish.”

Trish looks up from her eggs. “What? Jess, eat. It’s not poisoned.”

“See, now that you’ve said ‘not poisoned,’ all I can think is that it is, in fact, poisoned.”

“Oh my god. Don’t be so dramatic.”

Jess slams her fist down on the table so hard that she leaves a crack in the wood. “Five hours ago, you were so eager to get out of here that I had to literally chain you to the literal wall. And now, you’re...I don’t even know. Seriously, what is going on with you right now? Am I gonna hear about another asshole from Erik’s list with his neck snapped in an alley somewhere?”

Trish raises an eyebrow at Jess across the table and returns her fork to her plate. “You really don’t trust me at all anymore, do you?”

“No! Why the hell should I?” Jess leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. 

Even now, she’s not entirely sure that’s true. Anyone else would have turned Trish over to the cops by now, knowing what she’s done, what she still wants to do. But a part of her — the stupidest, most kicked-dog part of her — will always trust Trish, will always give her another chance, and another, and another. 

With a defeated sigh, Trish pulls Jessica’s plate towards her and eats a piece of first the eggs, then the pancetta. Then she slides it back in Jess’s direction. “Not poisoned, okay? Please, eat. I’m worried about you.”

Jess doesn’t hold back the laugh that escapes her at that declaration. “ _You’re_ worried about _me_?!”

“Of course! I’m always worried about you. Even if we don’t always see eye to eye —”

Jess scoffs. “Understatement of the goddamn millennium.”

“Millennium’s still young.” 

“Don’t be fucking cute.” 

“Eat your damn breakfast.”

Jessica resigns herself to the fact that if she’s going to have it out with Trish, it’s best done not on an empty stomach. And even her tricked-out lab rat body needs sustenance, especially now that she’s rocking the “no spleen” look. So with a glance at Trish that she hopes is hateful but is probably just petulant, Jess tucks into the food on her plate. It is, infuriatingly, delicious.

So engrossed is she in the pancetta that she misses the fond, borderline adoring, smile that cracks Trish’s face at the sight of Jessica Jones eating a square meal.

Between mouthfuls, Jessica says, “My question still stands. Whose dead body am I gonna hear about from Costa or Hogarth later today?”

“No one. I didn’t — I didn’t look for any new targets yet, okay?”

“ _‘Targets’_? Jesus, Trish.”

“Semantics. Point is, you were right. I...I needed to take a step back. Assess this whole…” Trish trails off, making vague gestures in the air with her hands.

“...Murder spree?” Jess offers.

Trish purses her lips. “...Situation,” she says finally. “I’ve lost a lot, we both have, and I…I want to make things right between us. Genuinely. There’s only two people I ever gave a shit about, really, and one of them is…” 

Jessica meets her eyes, and sees something in them that hasn’t been there since before Trish started dosing herself with Simpson’s inhaler.

“I can’t lose you too. Not again.” With these words, Trish covers Jessica’s hand with her own, and the kicked dog in Jess betrays her, yet again. 

This woman has lied to her over and over again, has killed in cold blood, has killed _Jessica’s own mother_ in front of her face, and yet here Jess is, ready to believe her one more time, to trust that she means what she says, even though she has no earthly reason to, to invite her back in one more time. 

Trish Walker will be the death of her. But then, she’s known that since she was fifteen.

Jess turns her hand over and returns Trish’s grip, the bruises on Trish’s knuckles shining red against the white of Jess’s bandaged palm. “You can’t lose me. I’m a bad penny,” Jess says, hating the quaver in her voice.

But Trish beats her to it, releasing a wet sob that knocks out a few bricks in the wall she’s built around herself. “I miss her, Jess. I miss her.”

Jess’s body carries her thoughtlessly to Trish’s side, and she kneels at her feet like she did the night Dorothy died, like she always will, for as long as Trish lets her, no matter how much they hurt each other in between. “I know you do. I know you do.” 

Sallinger is behind bars, and Jess has less than the usual amount of bruises, and Trish is here, and neither of them, for the moment, is trying to run. So Trish’s head falls to Jess’s shoulder, and Jess rocks her more gently than she’s ever done anything, and they’ve got time. They’ve got time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"when you are the only_   
>  _passenger if there is a_   
>  _place further from me_   
>  _I beg you do not go"_
> 
> _– Frank O’Hara, "Morning"_


	7. Forest Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“A hero isn’t supposed to need saving.”_
> 
> _Jess lets her hands drop. “No offense, Trish, but you’re a long fucking way from being a hero.” After a moment, she amends: “Actually, no, wait. Yes offense. Offense intended.”_
> 
> _Trish offers her a smirk. “Guess I deserve that one.”_

Trish feels like there are two people at war inside her. One of them stayed up all night to keep vigil over her best friend — bandaged Jessica’s bruises as she slept, went to the gourmet grocery store down the block to buy them food. The other stayed up all night scouring the Dark Web for schematics of the maximum security prison where Sallinger will be transferred in the next few days, remembered the satisfaction she felt when she tore her nails into the skin of his vile face, thought of the fastest way she could make him bleed out.

So while Jess slept fitfully upstairs, Trish took a scalding shower — her first in days — closing her eyes under the hot spray and wishing for the water to wash one or the other of her divided selves down the drain. When she was done, she toweled herself off and stood in front of the bathroom mirror, in so many ways a stranger to herself. She has superpowers; she has no mother; she has three people’s blood on her hands; and she has a woman upstairs whose dogged devotion to her makes everything so much more complicated.

Jessica still hasn’t forgiven her for Alisa — she knows that now. And she also knows, having so freshly lost her own mother, how deep and jagged a hole such a loss leaves behind. 

She’s spent years now — her whole life, maybe — nurturing the conviction that there is objective right and wrong, good and bad. Ever since she got her powers, she’s fancied herself the arbiter of it. And yet. 

Trish killed Alisa because she had to, because she was going to die either way, but at least way, she wouldn’t be able to bring Jess down with her. And yet… Alisa wasn’t, strictly speaking, a _bad_ person. Her life, her powers, were out of her control. Trish could certainly empathize with that.

And Dorothy… Had she been, strictly speaking, a _good_ person? Jess was right when she said she’d made Trish the person she is. But what does that mean? Dorothy was ruthless, manipulative, and cruel. Dorothy loved Trish inasmuch as Trish was useful to her. Dorothy gave her a gift that was also a curse. If Dorothy had had Alisa’s powers, what would she have done with them?

What made one murder forgivable and another a capital offense? And what made Trish think she was the one to decide that? _Because you are good,_ something inside of her says. _Because you worked for these powers, and you are the hero this city has always needed. Not Jessica, not Daredevil, not Luke Cage – you. You’ve always known what’s best. And finally you have the power to make a real change. You’ve got this._

Except for the first time, the voice sounds less like Trish’s own and more like Dorothy’s. Trish had wanted so much to be a hero, to do things the _right_ way, to be of use, that she’d never stopped to think that maybe Jessica’s reluctance to make judgment calls, her unwillingness to see the world in black and white, was an asset rather than a liability. She’d always thought that Jessica needed Trish to be her moral compass; now, she was starting to wonder if she’d had that the wrong way around.

So here she was, breaking down, gone soft in Jessica’s wiry arms, lost in the no man’s land that stretched out for miles inside her. “I miss her, Jess. I miss her.”

“I know you do. I know you do.” 

They stay that way for a while, until Jess extricates herself and sits down heavily on the floor. “What’s goin’ on with you, Trish?”

Trish slides off the chair and joins Jess on the concrete. She’s tired of looking down at her.

“Well, I took a shower.”

“Okay…”

“And I realized that maybe you have a point.”

Jess quirks an eyebrow. “About…?”

“About...everything. What I’ve been doing with these powers. What I can and can’t fix.”

“Wow. Must’ve been some shower.”

For this next part, Trish doesn’t trust herself to look her friend in the eye, so she worries at a loose thread in her sweatpants, sliding her eyes along the warp and weft of the gray cotton. “Jess. I’m sorry about your mom. I don’t think I ever said that.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Trish sees Jess’s tapping foot freeze.

“I still think there’s no other way it could’ve ended, but...I wish it hadn’t been me. And I wish you hadn’t been there to see it.”

Jessica is on her feet, walking to the opposite end of the room. The apartment feels too small for this conversation. She knows Jess well enough to know that right now, she probably wants to find a place to hide.

“Losing my mom, it’s been…” Trish pauses. _I feel like I walked through a forest fire and I’m still burning._ But she doesn’t say that. Instead, she voices her earlier thought. “If I were you, I’d have killed me for what I did.”

Jessica turns at this. She strides toward Trish and stands over her, and it takes all of Trish’s strength not flinch. Jessica looks down at her, and her eyes are wide and red-rimmed. “No, you wouldn’t have,” she says, with conviction.

As soon as the words are out there, Trish realizes it’s true. Trish may have lost herself, but Jess never did. Her voice cracks as she looks up at her and says, “No, I wouldn’t have.”

Jessica crouches beside her and takes Trish’s hands. “You’d never hurt me, Trish.”

“I hurt you all the time, Jess.”

Jess shakes her head. “Not like that.”

And there it is — her true north, her compass realigning after the storm tossed her till she didn’t remember which way was up: _She would never hurt Jess._

“You know I don’t buy into all this good-and-evil, moral-binary crap, right?” Jessica says.

“Aren’t you literally sleeping with the arbiter of the moral binary?”

“Shut up. I don’t care what Erik’s migraine says, okay?” She frames Trish’s face between her palms. “You are worth saving.”

“A hero isn’t supposed to need saving.”

Jess lets her hands drop. “No offense, Trish, but you’re a long fucking way from being a hero.” After a moment, she amends: “Actually, no, wait. Yes offense. Offense intended.”

Trish offers her a smirk. “Guess I deserve that one.”

“Being able to do crazy backwards cartwheels doesn’t make you a hero. You know that, right?”

“So what does?”

Jess laughs, as if this is the most hilarious question anyone has ever asked. Maybe it is. “Fucked if I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I am a forest fire  
>  And I am the fire and I am the forest  
> And I am a witness watching it  
> I stand in a valley watching it_
> 
> _– Mitski, "A Burning Hill"_


	8. She Would’ve Hated That Font

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“And excuse me for being fucking cheesy I guess, but I’d kind of like to leave this lousy world better than I found it, a.k.a., not littered with corpses. So, yeah, Trish. Actually, I_ do _fucking get it.”_

Turns out there’s no rehab for someone who’s addicted to vigilantism, just like there’s no anger management for someone who spent six months as a mind-controlled puppet. The world is too narrow to deal with either of their problems; there’s no one like Jessica or Trish except each other. Which, really, isn’t so different from how it’s always been.

It begins with a visit to Dorothy Walker’s grave, because neither of them actually made it to the burial. “You sure you’re ready for this?” Jessica asks as she and Trish walk along the footpath through Woodlawn Cemetery. Late autumn has descended on the city in earnest, shaking the last leaves off the trees and sending frigid winds down the avenues, and Jessica is wrapped up in her big black coat, happy to shield herself from the world beneath its massive hood.

“Not really,” Trish says, at her side. She’s wearing a navy wool overcoat, her hair long beneath a gray beanie. She looks more like the old Trish — the one who puts herself together no matter the situation, the one who tries to at least  _ pretend _ that everything is okay.

“We can go back,” Jessica offers. “Go grab some Chinese takeout and watch shitty television. You don’t have to do this. Any of this. If you’re not up to it.”

Trish smiles at her sadly. “Thank you. But. I’m never gonna be up to it. So let’s just do it. Besides, we came all the way up here.”

Jess hates this,  _ hates this,  _ but she knows from the minimal amount of therapy she allowed herself that talking is a thing you’re supposed to do, so: “Where do you wanna be right now?” The question comes out through clenched teeth.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

Trish looks at her with appraising eyes. After a long moment, she says: “Wringing Sallinger’s neck. Doing to him what he did to he —” She stops herself. “You know what I was doing last night? While you were sleeping?”

Jessica feels a chill go down her spine that has nothing to do with the weather. Here it comes. “What?”

“I was looking up schematics for the prison where they’re keeping him. Trying to figure out the best way to break in.”

“Where do you even find schematics for a prison?” Jess thinks she knows the answer, but she wants to hear Trish say it.

“The Dark Web.”

“Jesus, Trish.”

“Look, I’m not proud of it.”

“You know what else you can buy on the fucking Dark Web? Military-grade weapons with their serial numbers scraped off. Date rape drugs.”

“Jess, I —”

“Child pornography.”   


“Jess.”

“Sex slaves.” 

“Jess! Okay! I get it!”

Jessica stops in her tracks and makes Trish face her. “Do you? ’Cause that is some real fucked-up shit, Trish.” 

“I know.”

“You brush up against that kind of darkness, it’s gonna rub off on you.”

Trish avoids her eyes. “I’ve already killed three people. It’s a little too late to —”

“Are you planning on killing more people?” Jessica is careful to keep her voice low. You never know who’s listening, even in a graveyard.  _ Especially  _ in a graveyard.

There’s a pregnant pause in which Trish looks up at the November clouds, her eyes moist, mouth open as if she can’t get enough air. At last she returns her gaze to Jessica and replies: “No.”

The woman in front of her has lied to her so many times, betrayed her trust in ways she wouldn’t even have thought possible. But she’s also had her back so many more times than that, from the bad old days of their childhood to the time Jessica was too wrecked to even feed herself, Trish was there. And she was so strong, even when the stand she was taking was completely shit-headed. 

“Do you believe me?” Trish says.

“I don’t know,” Jessica answers, honestly. “I want to. I really want to, Trish. But —”

Trish shakes her head and continues walking. Jess follows, because what the hell else has she ever done?

“It’s okay if you don’t. _ I  _ wouldn’t believe me,” Trish says. “But I’m gonna prove it to you, Jess, I swear. I want to be…” The thought dies on her tongue. She looks down at her hands — the ones that bashed Jace Montero’s head in and tore up Gregory Sallinger’s face — as if she could read the answer there. “I don’t know what I want to be. But I don’t want to be who I’ve been lately.”

Jess smirks at her behind her hood. “That’s something.”

The dirt still hasn’t settled on Dorothy’s grave, as if she’s still kicking around in there, agitating her coffin so she can return to the world of the living and land her daughter three more sponsorship deals by Friday. (Jess hasn’t asked whether her friend is planning to return to  _ Style by Trish.  _ She thinks it’s probably best if maintaining an alter ego isn’t her top priority right now. Besides, those sweater sets were truly vomit-inducing.)

“She would’ve hated that font,” Trish says, with an appraising look at the headstone.

“She’ll cope. Your mom was nothing if not adaptable,” Jess offers. 

Trish is still as a statue, her eyes shining with unshed tears. She can see Trish shaking a little with the effort of holding back her emotions.

“Just let it out. No one’s watching,” Jess says quietly.

“You are.” There’s an unmistakable quaver in Trish’s voice.

“After all we’ve been through? I think I can handle it.”

“Jess, you don’t…” Trish paces back and forth like a caged tiger. “You don’t get it. Ever since I found her, all I’ve been able to feel is anger. And if I can’t use it, if I can’t channel it into doing what I’d like to do to the piece of shit that killed her, to all the pieces of shit who hurt people, then what’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?”

Jessica feels like she’s back at square one, and she is fucking over it. So she rounds on Trish, gesturing at where Dorothy lies in the ground. “You think I’m not angry too? At Sallinger, for what he did to her? To Erik? To  _ me _ ? I don’t have a spleen anymore, Trish! You think I’m not mad at — at every garbage sack of feces who hurt me? At every pencil-dick fuckwad at every shitty bar who thought he was better than me? You think I’m not angry at  _ you _ ? I’m pissed off all the time. Always. But I channel it. I find fucking outlets for it. If I let out all the anger that I feel, every sleazebag in Hell’s Kitchen would be beaten to a slimy pulp by now. But I  _ don’t.  _ Because I’m not the fucking Hulk. And excuse me for being fucking cheesy I guess, but I’d kind of like to leave this lousy world better than I found it, a.k.a.,  _ not  _ littered with corpses. So, yeah, Trish. Actually, I  _ do  _ fucking get it.”

Jessica’s not sure how she expected Trish to react, but she certainly doesn’t see what happens coming, which is that Trish throws her arms back and unleashes a primal sound that’s somewhere between a snarl and a wail, a sound so loud and angry and mournful that it shakes the birds from the trees and sends a black cloud of crows scattering into the gunmetal sky. It seems to go on forever, to break the sound barrier, and Jessica wonders if Trish has another new power she never bothered to tell her about. 

But then that banshee cry dissolves into all-too-human weeping, and Trish falls to her knees before the grave of the woman who loved her to a terrible fault, who was a force of nature, who was charming and cruel, who was gone forever and too soon and never soon enough.

Jess lets the other woman fall into her, takes her weight and the racking of her sobs and all the shit she can dish out. Trish in her arms smells like lavender shampoo and the ozone scent that comes after a lightning strike, fragility and power and so much feeling contained in one small person. Even with her knees cramping on the frosty grass and her friend’s tears soaking the front of her coat, Jess knows she is exactly where she’s supposed to be, exactly where she can only ever be: standing between the woman she loves and the storm.

After a small eternity, when Trish’s sobs finally subside, Jess touches her lips to the fabric of her friend’s beanie and murmurs, “You ready?”

She feels Trish nod in response and they gently extricate themselves from each other. Jess moves to stand but finds that her legs are asleep, and falls to the ground. But Trish is already on her feet, holding out a hand to help Jessica up.

“Cat power bonus?” Jess says as Trish pulls her to standing.

“They’re not  _ cat _ powers.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

They turn their attention back to the dead woman. “What would she think of me now?”

“She’d be proud of you,” Jess says, without hesitation. “She always was, in her fucked-up way.”

“I want to tell her I’m sorry, but she’d just say…”

Jess cuts in with her best Dorothy, which admittedly isn’t very good:  _ “Don’t be sorry. Be better!” _

Trish looks at Jess for a long moment. “Yeah. Exactly.”

Jessica stoops to pick up a rock off the ground and place it on the grave marker. She’s not Jewish, but the idea of leaving flowers at Dorothy’s grave feels too saccharine. A stone — cold, unyielding, but always fucking there — feels like a more fitting tribute. 

“Ready to head back? It’s cold as shit out here.” She holds out a black-gloved hand to Trish, who eyes it suspiciously. Jess wiggles her fingers. “One-time offer. Get it while I’m maudlin.” That earns her a true laugh as Trish takes the hint and links their fingers. 

They’re a long way from okay, and Jess knows that Trish has a dark and twisty road ahead of her. But for the first time in weeks, as they walk hand in hand out of the cemetery in the gathering dusk, Jessica allows herself to be on the outskirts of hopeful.

_ Don’t be sorry. Be better. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body."_
> 
> _— Sally Rooney, "Normal People"_


	9. Mayakovsky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Trish still thinks of all the people she could take down, people who are still out there. Crooked cops and predatory landlords, rapists and murderers and runaway capitalists. But she’s finally beginning to realize that justice has to be about more than her idea of it, about more than her vision of herself as a savior. (“Literally that’s why they call it a white savior complex, Trish,” Jessica reminds her one morning over breakfast.)_

Trish Walker has never been very good at slowing down. Dorothy made sure of that. Slowing down means that other people get ahead of you — more mediocre, less deserving people — and we can’t have that, can we? That’s what led to the pills in the first place, and the coke, and every other little disastrous picker-upper that got her through her teens and early twenties. After she got clean, it was time to go after even bigger fish; within a few weeks of leaving rehab, she was already a few meetings into the process of getting _Trish Talk_ off the ground. She moved so fast, in fact, that she didn’t often stop to think about whether she actually _wanted_ what she had signed herself up for until it was too late. 

It became so easy to accumulate what she _didn’t_ really want — a career as a talk show host, an airy penthouse apartment, relationships with men who looked great in paparazzi photos — that the moment she started to let it all go, the downslide was intoxicating. It started when she broke things off with Griffin and snowballed from there. She could let go of everything she was supposed to care about even faster than she could accumulate it, and the head rush of finally becoming what she wanted to become — a goddamn superhero, goddamnit — was a heady cocktail that led her to the kind of behavior she was starting to deeply regret.

So here she is, at 35, trying her level best to take it slow, to think before she acts, to question what she had, until a few weeks ago, thought was fundamentally true. It starts with letting go of what she definitely doesn’t need or want, which was the easy part. The network will have to rebrand _Style by Trish_ now that it doesn’t have a Trish anymore, but the execs are surprisingly understanding. (Mostly because everyone had loved, or at least feared, Dorothy Walker, and her untimely passing would take an understandable toll.)

The next thing is harder to let go of — her constant vigilance in re: people who are out there doing Bad Things. The kind of bad that makes her want to break necks, the kind of bad that ends in crime scenes and blood staining her hands. So she turns off all her Google alerts, stops reading the _Daily Bugle_ crime blotter, and stuffs her police scanner in the back of a drawer. Cold turkey. That’s the way to do it, right? 

Trish still thinks of all the people she could take down, people who are still out there. Crooked cops and predatory landlords, rapists and murderers and runaway capitalists. But she’s finally beginning to realize that justice has to be about more than her idea of it, about more than her vision of herself as a savior. (“Literally that’s why they call it a white savior complex, Trish,” Jessica reminds her one morning over breakfast.)

So Trish lets go, and she slows down, and she takes a break from the Krav Maga and the agility training. She picks up yoga again, which she finds she’s now advanced at thanks to her powers. (Wounded Peacock pose is a snap these days.) She breathes and she breathes, and she tries not to break. 

Malcolm, of all people, shows up at her apartment one day asking if Trish feels like taking a trip down to Ikea in Red Hook, and he helps her pick out a sofa and a coffee table to make her place feel a little less like a dojo and a little more like a home. (“Why are you being so nice to me?” she asks him on the ferry ride to Brooklyn. Malcolm shrugs and sips his coffee, gazing off into the middle distance of the bay. “Because I can tell you’re trying.”)

So anyway, Trish has a living room now (sort of). And she tries her level best to _live_ in it.

And then there are the things she doesn’t let go of, the things that she’d never want to lose. Namely, Jessica. Jessica who never gave up on her, Jessica who is pulling her hand over hand out of the abyss, Jessica who is at once the most cynical and the most endlessly hopeful person she knows.

Jess doesn’t leave Trish alone much these days. Sometimes a stakeout or a tricky case will take her away for a day or two, but at the end of it, she always winds up back at Trish’s place. Trish doesn’t remember giving her a key, but somehow she has one, and it’s not really worth asking how. (And anyway, it beats her breaking the door open with her fist. Trish thinks that maybe Jess’s own getting destroyed all the time has given her a healthy respect for thresholds.) 

The upshot is, there’s no point in Trish trying to build a wall to keep her out, because Jess will just vault over it regardless. Which is just as well, because Trish is tired of trying to keep her at arm’s length. 

Jess starts sharing Trish’s bed with absolutely zero fanfare, as if it has been this way for years instead of years ago. It’s different, though; they keep to their own sides of the mattress. The simple fact of Jessica’s presence a few feet away, her reassuring weight, is more than Trish ever could have hoped for after what they’d put each other through — what she’d put Jess through. _I choose you, every day,_ she remembers Jess telling her, that awful day a few months back when the world seemed blacker than it had ever been. She wasn’t ready to hear it, back then, but now she _sees_ it, snoring softly next to her without having bothered to take off its leather jacket.

The nights Jess isn’t there, Trish tries not to wonder about — whether she’s on a stakeout or in mortal danger or finding some dude or other to keep her bed warm back uptown. (Erik? Someone else? Come to think of it, what the hell ever happened to that guy Oscar?) It doesn’t matter, not really. Jess always comes back to her in the end, bringing Chinese takeout and extracurricular case files. Jealousy simply doesn’t factor into it, because it’s not like they’re… Well, what are they, exactly?

They can even be jokey about it, because down beneath all the superficial differences, they share the same pitch-black sense of humor. _“Hi, honey, I’m home.” “How was work, dear?” “Shitty. You kill anyone today?” “That depends. Did you pick up dinner?”_

The joke isn’t that Trish would never kill someone, because she has, or that they’d never behave like an old married couple, because they kinda do, but that both of these things exist in such murky proximity to the truth that the quips themselves become a kind of dare. Either way, they’ve become downright domestic — or at least, more domestic than either of them have ever been.

One night, while Jess is poring over a case file and Trish is reading on the couch, a sudden thought brings a question to Trish’s lips. “Hey. What made you decide you wanted to be a P.I.?”

Jess looks up from her file (that she will, as is customary these days, tell Trish nothing about). “Um...what? Where’s this coming from?”

Trish shrugs and puts down the issue of _The Atlantic_ she’s skimming, which has a feature in it by Griffin Sinclair that she is pointedly _not_ reading. “Just curious.”

Jess thinks for a moment, then deadpans, “P.I. Fairy. Came in through my window one night and handed me an investigator’s license and a fifth of whiskey.

Trish cocks her head. “Jess. Come on.”

“Give me a real reason you want to know, and I’ll give you a real answer.”

Fair enough. “Alright, but you’re gonna hate it.”

“Try me.” Jess crosses her arms in front of her and settles against the table.

“After Kilgrave, when you were staying with me at our old apartment, you —”

“You’re right. I do hate it.”

Trish presses on. “You were so...lost. You didn’t want to do anything. You hardly wanted to even go outside.”

Jess whirls away toward the liquor cabinet. “As fun of a trip down memory lane as this is…”

“I never understood what made you decide to leave. I didn’t ask then, and I won’t ask now. But how did you get from there to...wanting to go after something again?”

Trish watches Jess’s shoulders unclench as she realizes what Trish is getting at, that she isn’t trying to breach the wall of Jess’s emotional solitude. “I…” she begins, sounding more uncertain than usual as she navigates the slippery rocks of her reasons. “I don’t know, really. I was kinda trapped up inside myself, I guess? I was always afraid that everyone I met was going to eventually turn on me or be used against me.” Jessica meets Trish’s eyes on those last words, and it’s like a dagger going through her.

“Jess, I didn’t mean to —”

“Shut up. This isn’t about you, okay? For once.”

Trish shuts up. She owes her at least that much — and a whole lot more.

“I guess I was just fucking sick of feeling that way. Like I’d been _done to_ and couldn’t do anything about it. Like I was helpless. Plus, I was broke and needed a job, but the thought of having some asswipe being my _boss_ sounded like a goddamn nightmare. So setting up shop in wrecked-ass Hell’s Kitchen and dealing with _other_ people’s lowlives for a change sounded...I dunno. Less shitty than what was already happening?”

Trish offers a small smile. “You didn’t need to worry about money, you know. I would have —”

“I _know_ you would have. I didn’t…” Jess closes her eyes for a moment and regroups. “I needed to prove to myself that I could stand on my own two feet. Especially after not being able to make even the smallest decision for myself for months, and…” She trails off with a weighty sigh and shakes her head. “I should’ve stuck with ‘P.I. Fairy.’”

Trish normally wouldn’t say the next thing, because she knows it’ll make Jessica cringe. But screw it. “I’m really proud of you, Jess. I don’t know if I ever told you that.”

Jessica turns her face away, but not fast enough for Trish to miss the deep red that dusts her cheeks at the words. “Okay, therapy session’s over,” she says, downing the last of the brown liquid from the glass. “We’re all fuckin’ _proud,_ whatever.”

Trish looks back down at the magazine in her lap, brushing her fingers across Griffin’s byline, because _of course_ she turned right to that fucking page. She thinks back to the revelation she had when she turned down his proposal, the first step in dismantling the life she’d constructed for herself post-Patsy: She didn’t want to fuck him, she wanted to _be_ him. And once she took that brick out of her foundation, the whole structure of her life became unsound.

Suddenly brimming with energy and eager for an outlet, Trish rises from the sofa and lets the _Atlantic_ fall to the floor. Her eyes drift from Jess, absorbed in her case file once more, to the punching bag that hangs in the corner. No yoga tonight. She shucks off her sweatshirt and pulls the handwraps from where they sit on the windowsill. She begins to wind them around her palms and feels the energy uncurl in her core. She stands before the heavy bag, barefoot in tights and a sports bra, practically vibrating with it. And for the first time in weeks, she throws a punch. 

The sense of release is overwhelming, each time her fist makes contact with the bag like siphoning off a small amount of the pressure that’s built up inside her in the past few weeks. Before long, she’s absolutely wailing on the bag, fists and feet delivering blow after blow to a target that won’t break, won’t bleed, won’t beg for mercy, won’t leave her the kind of beast that gives Erik migraines.

Trish knows Jessica is watching, can feel her eyes boring into the back of her neck, but she doesn’t care. She revels in it, in fact — Jess’s attention — the same way she has for as long as she can remember. Trish keeps at it, feels the heat rising inside her, the pleasure of inhabiting her own agile body, speed and precision and power and enough energy to power the Lower East Side. She doesn’t pretend the bag is Gregory Sallinger’s rib cage; she doesn’t pretend it’s Jace Montero’s face. For the first time in a long time, she simply glories in the power inside of her for its own sake. And it feels fucking incredible.

She’s so caught up in the rush of it, in the blood thundering in her ears and the triumphant smile cracking her face, that she doesn’t notice that Jess has wandered into her sightline until she nearly roundhouses her in the face. Jess barely flinches, throwing her weight against the far side of the heavy bag as Trish lands a final few hits. Then she bends over double, catching her breath and blinking sweat out of her eyes.

She looks up to see Jessica standing over her, quirking an eyebrow. She doesn’t wear that look of bruised horror she’d been giving Trish a few weeks back whenever she did something rash and inexplicable, which Trish goes ahead and counts as a win. 

Trish clocks a few things about Jessica as she returns to standing. Though she’s at rest, the color is high in her cheeks. Though it’s relatively bright in the room, her pupils are blown wide. Though she’s trying to keep it under wraps, she’s definitely holding back a smile. And though it’s something that at this point Trish registers as merely fact, it strikes her as if for the first time: Jessica is beautiful.

“Something you wanna talk about?” Jess says. 

Trish grins. “Nope.”

“Ooookay…”

“Besides,” Trish adds speaking the words as the challenge they’re meant to be, “Talking’s for assholes, right?”

Jessica’s eyes narrow when she clocks the intention behind her turn of phrase, which she herself once uttered years and traumas behind them. “Trish…”

“Jess.” She doesn’t advance toward her, because she knows that bearing down Jessica Jones without express permission is tantamount to a declaration of war. But she doesn’t back down either.

“What’s up?” Jess says, infuriatingly vague.

What’s up is that Trish _wants_ her, suddenly and decidedly, and the sensation of wanting something that doesn’t involve any kind of loss or moral compromise is exhilarating. But that kind of directness has never worked on Jess and probably never will, so she sidewinds. “I dunno. For the first time in a long time, I just feel _good._ And I...want to celebrate that.”

She moves forward, and when Jess doesn’t retreat, she lays a tentative hand on Jess’s side and pulls their bodies flush. 

Jessica looks down at the place where their hips meet meet with a smirk. “You’re sweating all over me there, Rocky.”

“That a problem?” Trish says.

“There’s a lot going on that’s problematic right now,” Jess mutters, but doesn’t pull away.

Trish brings one wrapped hand up to Jess’s face and cups her cheek. “Tell me to stop, and I will.”

Jess blinks at her, expression unreadable, and they just look at each other for a long moment. Trish is on the verge of closing the gap between them when Jess murmurs, “Stop.” 

And honestly, Trish didn’t expect that. But of course she pulls away immediately. “Okay.” She wants to ask why, but she’s equally not sure she wants to know the answer. So she doesn’t pry, but she also doesn’t apologize, and it doesn’t seem like Jessica needs or expects one. There’s this shorthand between them, built up over the decades, that allows them to elide moments that other people might find unbearably awkward. But it still smarts. It’s been a long time since Trish has felt something as simple as desire for another person. But it’s _Jess,_ and nothing with Jess has ever been simple. 

So Trish goes back to the heavy bag and Jessica goes back to her case file, and it’s almost as if that moment between them, fizzing with electricity, never happened. 

Except it totally did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Now I am quietly waiting for  
>  the catastrophe of my personality  
> to seem beautiful again,  
> and interesting, and modern."_
> 
> _— Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky”_


	10. Goddamn Feelings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Pull yourself the fuck together, Jones,” she mutters to herself, and decides that now is the right moment to get the hell out of this apartment that smells like Trish’s sweat and Trish’s shampoo and_ Trish _and go get a drink somewhere where nobody knows her name. Which is a taller and taller order these days, what with all the high-profile shit she’s gotten herself mixed up in, but Jessica Jones is nothing if not up for a challenge._

Jessica feels that good sort of burning in her chest, the kind that comes when the whiskey first hits her gullet or she lands a really solid punch. But it’s coming from somewhere new this time — or rather, old. It’s coming from the way she feels when she looks at Trish. Trish letting all her shit out, Trish unrestrained, Trish strong and smiling and ferocious, Trish _happy._ Or at least something like it. 

And Jess _wants_ Trish. Of course she does. But it can’t be now, and it can’t be like this, even though in the moment it would be so fucking effortless, so fucking _liberating,_ to just say screw it and slough off the tension that’s been building between them for literally years now. 

But goddamnit, now is not the fucking time. Jessica _knows_ that. There’s too much between them now — too much hurt, too much codependence, too much goddamn _history_ — for them to go back to the easy, ill-defined fuck-buddy escapades of their twenties. And even if Trish _thinks_ she wants her, Jess fears it would be one appetite displacing another. 

Trish needs her friendship right now — her support, her tough love, her steady presence, her watchful eye, even her empty banter. What she doesn’t need is Jessica’s desire, her confusion, her lust, her goddamn _feelings._ She’s only recently clawed her way back to something like stability, and Jess is pretty sure the last thing a recovering vigilante addict needs is murky sexual entanglement. 

So Jess pretends to pore over the documents from her latest case — a run-of-the-mill philandering husband with better-than-run-of-the-mill track-covering skills — and tries not to watch the movement of Trish’s shoulder muscles as she throws her fists against the heavy bag, tries not to notice the way the sweat trickles from her hairline down the nape of her neck, tries not to…

It’s been weeks since she’s seen Erik. She misses him sometimes — the weight of him, his wry smile, his dumb, sexy biceps, his fantastic fucking burgers. But the person she cares about more than anyone else on this shitty planet makes him physically ill, and Jess can’t do both. She just can’t. She’d say she ghosted Erik, but really, they ghosted each other, which is just as well for two fly-by-night barflys with lousy communication skills.

But goddammit, she’s only human. And Trish is… Well, maybe neither of them are only human, actually. Exactly her type.

She’s been staring so hard at the documents in front of her that she doesn’t notice Trish is talking to her until she’s shouting her name across the room. 

“ _What?_ ” It comes out angrier than she means it to. Oh fucking well.

“I said, I’m gonna take a shower.” Trish has a towel draped across her shoulders, and her face is red with exertion. 

“Okay, great. Congratulations? You don’t need my permission,” Jess spits back.

“Jesus, Jess. I was just checking in case you needed to use the bathroom first. But sure, jump down my throat.” 

The idiom leaves Jessica with an unasked-for mental picture of all the things she’d like to do to Trish’s _throat_ right now, and that’s when she knows she’s well and truly fucked. “No, I’m...I’m good.”

Trish hits her with one of her trademark eyebrow raises — the kind that means “I can see right through your bullshit” — before disappearing into the bathroom and slamming the door behind her. 

Once she hears the shower turn on, Jessica lets out a breath she didn’t realize she’s been holding. “Pull yourself the fuck together, Jones,” she mutters to herself, and decides that now is the right moment to get the hell out of this apartment that smells like Trish’s sweat and Trish’s shampoo and _Trish_ and go get a drink somewhere where nobody knows her name. Which is a taller and taller order these days, what with all the high-profile shit she’s gotten herself mixed up in, but Jessica Jones is nothing if not up for a challenge. She shrugs on her jacket and packs up her case file and resolves not to come back until she’s had a strong drink and a meaningless lay, preferably in that order and preferably before sunup. 

……..

They don’t talk about it, and that suits Jessica just fine. Not talking about shit she doesn’t want to talk about is her second favorite activity in the whole world — her first being making _other_ people talk about the shit _they_ don’t want to talk about. She doesn’t avoid Trish, not exactly. She’s still there nearly every day, still brings takeout, still spends the night. But she sleeps on the couch instead of the bed now, one of those pull-outs that doesn't make a big fuss about it (she’ll have to thank Malcolm for his solid taste in furniture). 

And if something begins to lie thick in the air between them again, she brushes it off and finds some one-nighter at a dive uptown to bring back to her disused bed back in Hell’s Kitchen. (“Why are your sheets _dusty_?” a bartender she’d brought home the other night had asked her with mild disgust. “Because I’m a ghost. Boo,” Jessica had deadpanned, before making her forget all about it. Leave it to another woman to call out her bad apartment hygiene; the dudes she brings home never notice.)

But something else woke up the night of the punching bag incident. There’s a new light in Trish’s eyes, and not in that scary street-justice junkie kind of way. She’s started to reach out to her old _Trish Talk_ contacts about journalistic work, of all things — namely investigative reporting, which has got to be the weirdest pivot from home shopping guru that the city has ever witnessed. But an unlikely career switch has never put off Trish Walker, and the ex-teen idol, ex-pop star, ex-radio host, ex-masked vigilante soon finds herself picking up freelance gigs for the _Daily Bulletin._

“You wrote this _without_ beating the shit out of anyone?” Jess says when Trish proudly displays her first byline, a half-pager on the rise of predatory landlord behavior in post-Incident Hell’s Kitchen.

“Yup. And it felt pretty great, honestly.” Trish says it so proudly and sincerely that Jessica momentarily loses her ability to be sardonic. “My editor told me that the asshole working on that big development over on 56th and 10th already got his license revoked by the city thanks to me.”

Jessica is so proud of her. Like, ridiculously proud. She wants to say something like, _See? There’s more than one way to be a hero._ Or, _I knew you could do it._ Or, _You are the most resilient person I’ve ever known._

But this type of unvarnished sincerity just isn’t in Jess’s lexicon, so she settles for: “You know print journalism is a dying field, right?” 

Trish just shrugs and smiles. “What can I say? I love a lost cause.”

Jess knows it’s true, because Trish loves _her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”_
> 
> _– Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Hedonism”_


	11. Pivot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _If Jessica notices the smile that creeps across Trish’s face as the wheels spin in her restless mind, she doesn’t say anything. But when Trish glances over, she notices Jess is smiling too, just a little. “Wanna head back?”_
> 
> _Jess kicks a rock across the sidewalk and meets her eyes briefly. “Yeah. Okay.”_

Trish is trying so hard to be good, to be better. But god, it isn’t easy. She still wakes herself up at night thinking of all the things she’d like to do Sallinger, all the ways she could make him suffer, all the bitterness he deserves. Sometimes, she can settle herself down just by lying there in the dark, letting her racing heart settle and listening to the night sounds of the city, the quiet hum of her apartment, Jessica’s breathing on the sofa below her loft as sleeps.

Other nights, it’s a restlessness that sends her out into the streets of Long Island City, beating her way down the deserted sidewalks. If she’s alone, she’ll find the nearest fire escape and make her way up to the rooftops, leaping and flipping her way from building to building in the moonlight, reveling in the lithe ease of her body as it flows through space. She has to use these powers for  _ something,  _ goddamnit. Besides, it’s empty up here, and she likes the quiet. (Except that one night when she’d nearly dodged a run-in with Spider-Man. What was that guy even doing all the way out in Queens, anyway?) 

Other nights, Jess wakes up when she hears Trish stirring, and tags along. The first time this had happened, Trish bristled at the intrusion. 

“You don’t trust me to be out on my own, do you?” 

“Trish, chill,” Jess said as she pulled on her boots. “I  _ do _ trust you. I just figured you might want some company.”

She looked Jess up and down in the streetlight filtering in through the windows, who merely offered an exhausted shrug. Trish decided to believe her. “Fine. Okay.”

“So fuckin’ punchy,” Jess said, not unfondly, nudging Trish’s shoulder with her own. 

Since that night, it’s become a semi-regular occurrence. They don’t talk much on these walks, which can sometimes last until dawn starts punching pink bruises into the sky, but Trish thinks that the easy silence between them is its own form of conversation. 

It’s on one of these insomniac rambles through windswept post-industrial Queens, as Trish’s restless mind is leafing through the pages of her life, Jess a shadow at her side, that she gets an idea. She’s been running herself ragged for weeks trying to think of a way she could do what she’d wanted to do in the first place — right wrongs, fight evil, earn people’s  _ respect _ — without setting off some of her own worst impulses. 

She thinks of Griffin, how she’d itched with jealousy whenever he’d jet off to an assignment, hearing tales from his embedded work in the Middle East and wishing herself into his shoes. She thinks of how she felt when she saw him reporting from Syria on TV, a few weeks after they’d broken things off. Then she thinks of all the rot and corruption closer to home, how she’d always found the local news coverage insufficient, how it only seemed natural to not only dig for what the papers and news channels had missed, but to finish the job no one else was doing. 

But what if she cut out the last part, the death blow? What if there was a way she could bring bad people to their knees without  _ literally  _ bringing them to their knees?

When she’d tried to pivot  _ Trish Talk  _ away from jazz flautists and toward serious journalism, it had blown up in her face. No matter; some things are better left burned to the ground. Her mistake was thinking it could be a smooth transition, but she realizes now that she’ll have to start from scratch. And that’s fine, honestly. It’s not the first time, and it probably won’t be the last.

If Jessica notices the smile that creeps across Trish’s face as the wheels spin in her restless mind, she doesn’t say anything. But when Trish glances over, she notices Jess is smiling too, just a little. “Wanna head back?”

Jess kicks a rock across the sidewalk and meets her eyes briefly. “Yeah. Okay.”

……...

If there’s been one constant in Trish’s life, it’s that people always, always underestimate her. She’s beautiful in that conventional sort of way that makes people (men, in particular) see her as someone who coasts by on her looks, her charm. They expect her to be vapid, disappointing, easily swayed. If only they knew how hard Trish had to work for everything, how she’s been clawing her way out of the pit since before she lost her baby teeth. 

But she knows how to use people’s assumptions that she’ll be a disappointment, a pushover, a basic bitch. She plays the part when it suits her, and drops the charade when it no longer serves her. And if they still don’t take her seriously, well. There are plenty of ways she can get her way without resorting to a pummeling. Trish’s super agility and heightened senses may have been recent acquisitions, but she knows now: She had superpowers long before she went knocking on Dr. Malus’s door.

It’s how she manages to secure herself a meeting over deli sandwiches with the editor-in-chief of the  _ Daily Bulletin,  _ who eyes her with both skepticism and obvious desire as he tucks into his corned beef. He suggests that she try writing a lifestyle feature first, at which suggestion Trish resists the urge to either roll her eyes or knee him in the balls. But by the time the check comes, she’s convinced him to let her write a piece on spec about crooked developers in Hell’s Kitchen. 

Turns out the skills she acquired as a would-be vigilante translate pretty well to doing investigative work, clambering up the skeletal frames of half-built high rises and listening in on hushed conversations that her enhanced hearing help her pick up on. Jace Montero’s untimely demise left a hole in the uptown gentrification game a mile wide, which is being rapidly filled in by all manner of eager developers happy to cut corners and worse.

The story she comes up with is a cool 2,000 words that earns Trish her first byline in the  _ Bulletin  _ and her first paycheck as a legitimate journalist. She’s sure that within a few months she can get herself a staff position. Because she’s Trish Fucking Walker; when she sets her sights on something, she gets it.

And this is how Trish begins to claw her way into the next stage of her life, one where she sublimates her considerable energy and rage into something a little less grisly and ignominious. She doesn’t know how long it’ll hold, but it’s working for now, and that’s the best she can hope for right now.

And above all, there is Jess, by her side, in her corner, who she owes everything to, who she never wants to lose again. Jess seems to know what Trish needs these days, even if Trish doesn’t always know herself. 

Sometimes, Trish finds herself wishing she knew what Jessica needed. Ever since that night a few weeks ago, it’s become pretty clear that it isn’t  _ Trish  _ that Jess needs, even if Trish still aches for her in a way that is decidedly not platonic. But she’ll take whatever Jess is willing to give; and even if it’s not everything, it’s still so much more than Trish deserves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in.”_  
>  – Patti Smith, Just Kids
> 
> [AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm pretty sure that in the show, Trish's new apartment is supposed to be in Soho. But as a New Yorker, that makes no fucking sense to me. Soho is one of THE most gentrified neighborhoods in the city, and doesn't have a history in the Marvel Universe of being leveled like Hell's Kitchen does. So I put her across the river in Long Island City, which tends to empty out after dark and has the haunted, post-industrial quality that I think matches the mood here.]


	12. Yikes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The men and their captives turn to look at her._
> 
> _“I’m sorry, but I think I just heard you call a human being ‘meat,’ and, y’know, Good Samaritan laws and all.”_
> 
> _“Who the fuck is this and where the fuck did she come from?” the tall one growls._
> 
> _“Down the chimney, motherfucker,” Jess spits. It is almost Christmas, after all._

Here’s the thing about leading the kind of life that Jessica Jones has: You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even when things are easy, you never feel at ease. Lulls in the action make Jess itchy, even more of a live wire, make her reach for the bottle more often, make her go for the punch to the face when diplomacy would have sufficed. 

The thing about assuming that everything will go to shit on the regular is that if no shitstorm appears, you’ll kick up your own and call it the weather.

Which is how Jessica finds herself dangling one-armed off the side of a Harlem parking garage at 2am on a Friday night, trying to catch a couple of human traffickers in the act. She holds her cell phone in her other hand, camera set to record. (If there’s one thing the whole Sallinger debacle taught her about detective work, it’s that she needs all the evidence she can gather before she sends squirrely motherfuckers to the cops.)

She’s been taking on more and more dangerous cases lately — the real bad ones, the hard ones, the ones that could land her ass in real and proper trouble. Malcolm and Gillian had both fixed her with their best concerned faces when she’d left to go on this one, but screw them. She could handle herself. And Trish… Well, for a whole variety of reasons, Trish didn’t know about what Jessica got up to when she wasn’t with her at her apartment in Queens. Jess knew better than to tell her, and Trish knew better than to ask. Who’d have thought that after all these years, they’d have finally learned about boundaries? 

Jess has been tailing these two particular pieces of shit — a pair of rangy, tatted white dudes with matching shaved heads and terrible tracksuits — all the way from Sheepshead Bay to this particular high-rise garage all the way the hell uptown. She’s exhausted, in a bone-deep way, but at least she’s channeling all the churning shit, the constant headache at the base of her skull, the alarm sounding always, always, in the back of her mind, into something useful. She’ll catch these guys red-handed, gift wrap ’em for the cops, rescue her client Angela Rodriguez’s missing daughter, and come back home to Trish before sunup.

_ To Trish’s home,  _ Jessica silently corrects herself.  _ Come back to Trish’s home.  _ It’s definitely Trish’s apartment and not hers, and she’s definitely not having dumb, complicated, useless feelings about Trish right after her friend has just barely pulled herself out of a seriously deep downward spiral. 

(But actually, the feelings aren’t complicated at all. Jessica  _ wants _ Trish, in every sense of the word. She wants to come home to her and fall into bed with her, and wake up with her and spend the day with her, and then do the same thing all over again. In other words: Yikes.)

“You got what we came for?” 

Jessica comes back to herself — to the ache in her arm and the stupidity of her predicament — as the taller of the two men speaks. From what she can see on her phone screen at the strange angle she’s at, a van has just pulled up (a hybrid, nearly silent) and a third man has stepped out, dressed head to toe in black like some kind of old-timey bank robber.

“That depends,” the man in black replies. “You got the money?”

“Right here.” The shorter man hands the taller man a metal briefcase, and Jess hears the telltale snap as he opens it to reveal its contents, which she can’t quite see. 

Here arm is screaming at her at this point, feeling like it could come loose from its socket at any moment, and Jessica wishes they would hurry the hell up. 

Finally,  _ finally,  _ the man in black opens knocks on the back of the van, and another man (it’s always fucking men) jumps out with a gun in one hand, ushering three women — girls, really — out after him. They’re bound and gagged, and through the pain in her arm, Jess recognizes one of them as her client’s missing daughter, Maria. 

It’s hard to see through the phone screen, but Jess knows the fear in her eyes — knows it from Hope Shlottman back in the bad old days, from teenage Trish when Dorothy came at her with a Teen Choice Award, from Sallinger’s photos of his victims, from her own broken insides. Jessica knows what fear and defeat look like, particularly the fear of women and girls. And if there was one thing she was put on this lousy, stinking earth to do, it’s this.

“Fresh meat,” the tall man murmurs, with an appraising pinch of Maria’s arm. And evidence shmevidence, that is fucking  _ it.  _ Jess thrusts her phone into the pocket of her coat, still recording, and launches herself up and over the side and onto the cement. If she dies tonight, at least there’ll be a little black box.

The men and their captives turn to look at her. 

“I’m sorry, but I think I just heard you call a human being ‘meat,’ and, y’know, Good Samaritan laws and all.” 

“Who the fuck is this and where the fuck did she come from?” the tall one growls. 

“Down the chimney, motherfucker,” Jess spits. It is almost Christmas, after all.

Is it a  _ good  _ idea to charge at four armed men with one half-asleep arm and a middling amount of super strength? Definitely not. Does Jessica do it anyway? For sure she does.

………

Four hours, a dislocated shoulder, and a trip to both the police precinct and the hospital later (thank fuckin’ christ for Claire Temple and her discretion), Jess lurches into her own Hell’s Kitchen shithole just ahead of the sunrise. She’s not keen on explaining to Trish why she’s got one arm in a sling and a face and torso covered in bruises — or, especially, who gave them to her — so she figures she’ll crash here till her super-healing does its thing.

_ Happy  _ wouldn’t describe how she feels. She’s too tired and life’s too fucking bleak for that. Maybe more like  _ satisfied  _ — satisfied that four pieces of shit who think of women as tradable assets are behind bars, satisfied that she didn’t have to resort to lethal force, satisfied that she only got grazed by a few bullets and not hit by any of them, satisfied that she got to see the look on Angela Rodriguez’s face when she clapped eyes on the daughter she thought she’d never see again.

Being a P.I., or a hero, or whatever, is grim work most days. But sometimes — just sometimes — you get a win. Jessica pours herself a celebratory two fingers of whiskey, downs it in a gulp, and collapses back onto her unmade bed fully dressed. As she drifts to sleep on a sea of pain meds, her thoughts drift over midtown and across the East River to Trish, who she hopes somehow, at the end of her murky journey out of the dark, will also maybe get to feel satisfied.

………

Jessica wakes with a groan to unforgiving daylight and someone — a very tall someone — standing over her bed. Instinct acting faster than thought, she jumps to her feet and tries to push him back, but he doesn’t budge an inch.

Of course he doesn’t, because it’s fucking Luke Cage. 

She scoffs and sits back down on the bed. “You ever heard of knocking?” 

“I did knock. For about ten minutes. Then Malcolm came out in the hallway and laughed at me and told me your lock was broken, and to just go on in.” He’s wearing an expensive-looking three-piece suit that fits him like a glove.

“Of course he did.”

“You ever gonna get that door fixed, Jones?”

“I wouldn’t have to if I had friends with actual fucking boundaries.”

Luke smiles down at her in that way that used to make her unravel. “Is that what we are? Friends?”

She gives that question the non-answer it deserves and pushes past his immovable bulk to go brush her teeth. After a moment, he follows after her, bulletproof hands in his pockets, and leans against the doorframe of the bathroom. “You okay? Looks like you got pretty dinged up last night.”

“I’ll live,” Jess deadpans through a mouthful of toothpaste.

“You always do,” he says.

Even now, long after her feelings for him have cooled, Luke still unsettles her, makes her feel like she isn’t good enough, isn’t strong enough. There’s too much wrapped up in him, too much guilt and frustrated desire. He’s Good, and she’ll never measure up to that. Not when there’s so much blood on her hands — some of it his. Some of it Reva’s. 

But the suit — expensive, bespoke, ostentatious — makes her wonder what he’s gotten himself into lately. Because in her personal experience, a wardrobe upgrade often comes along with a moral compromise. 

Jess splashes water on her face. “What’d you come here for, Luke?”

“Heard you were up in my neck of the woods last night.”

“Might’ve been. Whadda you care?”

“You could’ve dropped me a line. Let me know you were in the neighborhood.”

“Didn’t need backup.”

He raises an eyebrow. “That why your arm is in a sling?”

She pats her face dry. “It’ll be good as new in a couple days. You know that. What’s this really about?”

“I just like to know what’s happening in Harlem, is all. Who were they?”

“Human traffickers. Scum of the earth. They’re out of your hair now.” 

“Shit, really?” Luke looks genuinely surprised to hear this.

“Really really. Who told you I was up there last night, anyway? Claire?”

A look of thinly disguised anguish crosses his face at the mention of that name. “Me and Claire aren’t…”

“I don’t need to know,” Jess cuts in. She shoves past him into the hallway, and to her relief, he lets her.

“Fair enough.” He follows her into the kitchen, where she pours herself a morning whiskey that he graciously doesn’t comment on.

“So how did you know then?”

He shrugs with false nonchalance. “I hear things. Got eyes and ears all over the neighborhood these days.”

Jessica snorts out a laugh. “ _ Eyes and ears?  _ What are you, the King of Harlem all of a sudden?”

It was meant to be a joke, but Luke doesn’t crack a smile.

“...Are you?”

His hands go to the button of his suit jacket and he tilts up his chin. “Let’s just say I’ve moved up in the world a little. I, uh...run a nightclub now, if you can believe it.”

Jessica snorts. “A _ nightclub _ ?”

“Well, more than a nightclub. It’s a… It’s a long story.”

“I don’t need to hear it.”

“Good, ’cause I wasn’t gonna tell you.” 

“Okay, weirdo.”

If she’s honest with herself, the idea of a guy with as much raw power as Luke with even more power — it scares her a little. But she supposes if there’s anyone she generally trusts do the right thing with the keys to the kingdom, it’s him. He is Good, after all. Or at least, he used to be. Jess isn’t sure she knows him anymore, same as no one even knows the tip of what she’s been through lately. (Well, no one except Trish.)

“So our bad guys — they taken care of?” Luke asks.

“ _ My  _ bad guys,” Jessica amends. “And yup. I left ’em for Costa and the boys in blue along with all the evidence they can eat.”

“You think it’ll stick?”

“It fuckin’ better. Either way, my client’s got her daughter back.”

Luke tosses her one of his big smiles, bright as the sun. “I’m proud of you, Jones. You seem to be doing real good here.”

“Didn’t ask for your  _ pride,  _ coach. But thanks, I guess.”

“Not to mention that Gregory Sallinger thing recently. Your face was all over the news, y’know.”

“Yeah, and I hated every second of it.”

He chuckles. “I bet you did.” 

There’s a comfortable silence during which Jess sips her bourbon and Luke leans against the counter, and she wonders if maybe it could be like this — if the two of them could be just...friends.

But then he has to go and fuck it all up.

“There’s something else I needed to ask you about,” he says.

“No, I will not go to prom with you,” Jess says, hoping to delay whatever the fuck this is gonna be.

He doesn’t take the bait of her banter. “That, uh...masked ninja person you’ve been hanging out with. The one with the body count.”

Jess feels all the blood in her veins turn to ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.”_  
>  – Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land
> 
> [AUTHOR'S NOTE: I haven't actually watched season 2 of _Luke Cage,_ so apologies for any inaccuracies here.]


	13. Opposite Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“She needs to pay for what she did.”_
> 
> _“How do you know she hasn’t?” Jess turns and stands her ground. She’s sick to death of this all or nothing bullshit. Luke isn’t Good, and Trish isn’t Evil. They’re all just people; they’re all just fuckups. And they’re all trying the best they goddamn can._

“That, uh...masked ninja person you’ve been hanging out with. The one with the body count,” Luke says. 

And oh, he’s good; Jessica will grant him that. Making her think it was the arrests in Harlem last night that he cares about when really, it was this. The finger pressing against the fresh wound.

But hey, maybe growing up in the house of a child star has paid off, because it’s as easy as falling off a bar stool for Jess to school her face into boredom as she replies, “Haven’t seen her since October, so not exactly ‘hanging out with.’”

“Okay, but —”

“Maybe it was a Halloween thing, the whole mask deal,” she says, with as much breeziness as she can muster. She goes to pour herself some bourbon and then realizes she already has. _Shit. Fuck._ She needs something to do with her damn hands.

Luke grasps her shoulder and turns her to face him. She tries not to flinch. “You think I can’t tell when you’re dodging me? Give me a little more credit than that.”

She changes tack. “I don’t owe you any information, Luke. We’re square.”

He looks a little pained by that, but moves on quickly. “Jess. Come on. She did a lot of damage. It’s not exactly a secret.”

“It’s also not your problem,” Jessica replies through gritted teeth.

“A powered vigilante on the loose, going around doing extrajudicial murders? I’d say that’s everyone’s problem.”

“ _So_ glad you broke into my apartment to mansplain how justice works. Now get out.” Jess crooks her thumb in the direction of the door.

Luke ignores her and presses: “Why are you covering for her?”

“Why are you suddenly dressing like a mob boss?”

He purses his lips. “I’m not dressed like a…”

“You could bounce a nickel off that shoulder pad, Scarface.”

Luke levels a glare at her and fusses with the knot on his stupid tie. “I grew up. Made some choices. Maybe it’s time you did, too.”

“Again: out.” She walks toward the door, hoping it will encourage him to do the same. It doesn’t.

“Who is she? And don’t tell me you don’t know. Neither of us have patience for that secret identity crap.”

Jessica thinks back to a few years ago, the pair of them sharing an eye roll as Murdock pulled that ridiculous red cowl over his face. Simpler times, in so many ways. “She’s out of the game. Okay?”

“She needs to pay for what she did.”

“How do you know she hasn’t?” Jess turns and stands her ground. She’s sick to death of this all or nothing bullshit. Luke isn’t Good, and Trish isn’t Evil. They’re all just people; they’re all just fuckups. And they’re all trying the best they goddamn can.

Luke’s eyes drop to the ground and his hands go into his pockets, and Jessica knows he’s about to change up his strategy. “I know what it’s like to care about someone and...still do what has to be done.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“I ever tell you about my brother Willis?”

“No, but I have a feeling you’re gonna.”

“He started with nothing. But he always found a way to lose more. He deserved better. But those lives he ruined? That was on him.” 

“You sent him to prison,” Jess says. It’s not a question.

Luke looks up at her with big, rueful eyes. “Worse. I sent him to the Raft. Killed me to do it. But it was the right thing to do.”

She’s thankful that she’s only getting the Cliffs Notes version of this story. Because if she hears any more, she might grow to hate Luke. “The Raft? You sent your own _brother_ away to that floating human rights violation?”

He frowns and looks away. “He made a decision. And he forced me to make one too.”

“Bullshit.”

“He was a danger to himself and everyone around him. It was the only way.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.” He meets her eye again, and it takes everything Jess has not to blink. “Think about it, Jones.”

Jessica knows she had a hand in making Luke Cage what he’s become. He’s had unbreakable skin for as long as she’s known him, but now he thinks he’s untouchable to boot. She advances on him. “You know, I never thought I’d be the optimist of the two of us. But here we are, on fuckin’ Opposite Day. People don’t always change for the worse, Luke. Sometimes they get better, if you give them half a damn chance.”

She thinks of everyone she’s known who have been dealt shit hands in life, and she thinks about how no one’s redemption looks like a straight line pointing to the sky. Life is messy and it’s mean, and the only way through it is to find someone to care about and hold on tight.

Luke’s expression softens. “Must be a mighty big love you got for whoever’s under that mask.”

And in that moment, Jessica realizes she fucked up, because he _knows._ Or at least, she has a strong-ass hunch he knows. This is what she gets for trying to protect someone’s identity before she’s had coffee. So she opts for a feeble out: vague begging. “Luke… Please.”

He offers her a sad smile, and finally he looks like the old Luke again, the one who knew how to let things slide when he needed to. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come to give you a lecture on right and wrong. Honest.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

He lays a hand on her shoulder, but it feels friendly this time. “I trust you, Jessica Jones. If you say you’ve got a handle on things, that’s good enough for me.”

At these words, Jessica swallows back a super embarrassing lump in her throat. “How about we just agree to stay out of each other’s business. Lotta blocks between here and 96th Street.”

Luke lets his hand fall. “If that’s the way it’s gotta be.” He shrugs on his coat over his broad shoulders and turns to leave, but then chuckles softly with his fingers still curled around the doorknob.

“What?” Jess asks.

“Nothing. I just… Thought I came here to tell you what’s what. And now you’ve got me second-guessing one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make.” 

Jess nods, shortly. “Merry Christmas, I guess.”

“Merry Christmas. Keep an eye on your girl.”

 _Her girl._ Why does that make her feel warm all over? “You know I work alone.”

Luke smirks from the threshold. “Sure you do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“The time to make up your mind about people is never.”_  
>  – The Philadelphia Story


	14. Two Slow Dancers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Why?” Trish finally manages to get out, extricating herself from Jess. “Why do you keep giving me chances? Why do you never give up on me? After all that I’ve done?”_
> 
> _Jess takes Trish’s face in her hands and wipes away a tear with one callused thumb. “You know why.”_

One night in mid-December, when the city is snow-swept and Trish has ceded one corner of her apartment to a modestly sized Christmas tree, Jessica comes back late, wearing an expression that’s sourer than usual. 

Trish leaps off the loft balcony, where she’s been hanging in a suspended headstand, executes a double backflip, and lands silently on the concrete floor. “What’s up?” she asks.

“Anyone ever tell you bodies aren’t supposed to be able to do that?” Jess shoots back.

“Says the woman who can basically fly.”

“Oh my god, Trish, we’ve been over this. It’s just  _ jumping really hard. _ ”

Trish raises an eyebrow at her. “You’re dodging the question.”

Jess sighs as she unwinds her voluminous gray scarf, crusted in half-melted snow. “Luke stopped by my office today.”

“Wow. When was the last time you even saw him?”

“Same as when you did. Dragon Skeletongate of… God, when even was that?”

“2017,” Trish offers, remembering those wild few weeks when Jessica was running around town with Luke and Daredevil and that...glowing fist guy.

“Right. Yeah. So it’s been a minute.” 

Trish registers her agitation, her hurt. She’s never sure Jess really got over being hung up on the guy. But then, Trish didn’t really ever get over being hung up on Jess. So there’s that. “He have a case for you or something?”

Jessica scoffs and makes for the cupboard where she keeps her whiskey. “Yeah, a case of wanting to lord his  _ personal growth  _ the fuck over me. He was wearing a goddamn, like, tailored suit and strutting around like we  _ didn’t  _ bang each other’s brains out all over that apartment.”

Trish remembers Jess telling her the story about her and Luke breaking the bed. She remembers feeling jealous but not letting on, even though she knew Jess knew she was. She wonders, not for the first time, what sex with superpowers would be like.

“And he  _ owns a nightclub now?  _ Whatever.” 

“So what did he want?” Trish prompts.

Jess lets out a seemingly unrelated “Whoa,” and Trish turns around to see her staring slack-jawed at a bottle of bourbon. 

_ Oh, right.  _ Trish doesn’t stop herself from smirking.

“Jefferson’s Ocean?  _ Presidential Select _ ?” Jess says, with a reverence usually reserved for minor deities.

Trish stuffs her hands in her pockets and shrugs. “Happy early Christmas?”

“I’m pretty sure this stuff costs more than my rent.”

“If you’re gonna pickle your liver, you may as well do it in style. Just, y’know. Sip, don’t swig. That was barrel-aged at sea. Crossed the equator four times.”

Jess shakes her head, looking more affected than she usually lets show. “Trish. This is too much.”

Trish is on the verge of saying something desperately mushy, but stops herself short. She settles for: “You deserve it.”

A slow smile creeps across Jess’s face, and Trish wonders why they keep doing this dance around each other. But Trish isn’t about to make the first move again. That would just be  _ undignified. _

“I didn’t get you anything,” Jessica mutters.

Trish thinks:  _ I owe you everything. You gave me back to myself. I would give you the world, if you let me.  _ “Don’t worry about it.” There’s a pregnant pause, after which Trish clears her throat and does Jessica the mercy of changing the subject. “So wait, you never told me what Luke wanted.”

“Oh. Well.” Jess busies herself unwrapping the foil on the Jefferson’s Ocean as she speaks. “He heard about a dust-up in got involved in up in Harlem, which apparently is, like,  _ his turf  _ now.”

“That ‘dust-up’ the reason you’re favoring your left arm right now?” Trish asked.

“Jesus. How did you even notice that?”

Trish lifts her eyebrows. “I know how to read bodies. Might be the powers, might be just a me thing.” She hesitates before adding, “I know there’s very little point in me asking this, but are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Bad guys are behind bars, arm’ll heal.”

Trish knows that’s all the information she’ll get, and that has to be good enough, because something deep and dark in her gut twitches at the mention of  _ bad guys. _ She’s not ready yet. Maybe she never will be. But still: “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Jessica sighs as she pours herself a dram of high-end bourbon. “Trish. You know I can’t tell you about work shit. Not when you’re still —” 

“No, not that. And I agree, I get it. But there's something else.”

They stare each other down for a long moment before Jess finally breaks. “He wanted to know if I knew where the...masked vigilante I’d been hanging around with was.”

This was the last thing Trish expected to hear, and it pulls her up short. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Trish is terrified of the answer, but she asks, “What’d you say?”

Jess eyes Trish over the rim of her glass. “I told him she was out of commission.”

Trish’s heart starts racing, even though she’s long since cooled down from her workout. “He knows it was me, doesn’t he?”

Jess drinks the Jefferson’s Ocean down in one gulp. So much for savoring. “I mean...Luke’s not stupid. So, maybe. But he’s also pretty wrapped up in his own shit right now, so, maybe not.”

“Shit.” 

“I don’t think he’s gonna come looking for you. There’s not enough evidence to link you to Nussbaumer or Montero, so —”

That throws Trish. “Wait. How do you know that?”

Jess looks away pointedly, and Trish knows there’s something else she’s not telling her. “How do you know that?” she repeats.

“Because I made sure there wasn’t. Okay? I took care of it.”

Trish’s head is swimming. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t asked Jess about this before now, why getting arrested for what she’d done — for the  _ crimes  _ she’d committed — was somehow at the bottom of her list of priorities, below even  _ Buy a new sofa _ and definitely below  _ Win back Jessica’s trust. _ She’d even taken the first steps toward setting up a charitable foundation in her mother’s name — a scholarship fund for acting students, not to mention the high-profile gig at the  _ Bulletin. _ She hasn’t even considered that she should be lying low for anything other than her own sanity. The old Trish Walker myopia. So stupid.

“Jess. What did you do?”

“What I had to, alright?”

Trish feels a little sick. “Please tell me Jeri Hogarth didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“What?! God, no.” Jess looks genuinely disgusted at the notion. “I wouldn’t trust Hogarth with my  _ laundry.  _ It was just me. ...And Malcolm, a little.”

“Jesus, Jess.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter. It’s done. Your tracks are covered.”

Trish struggles to find the right words. “Maybe they shouldn’t be. Maybe I should be in —”

“No.” Jess says it like it’s that easy, like this wild mercy is something Trish deserves. 

“What I did to those men — to Nussbaumer and Montero — what I wanted to do to Sallinger — it was  _ wrong.  _ I know that now. And if I want to live by my own ideals, maybe I should be t—”

“No offense, but fuck your ideals. You  _ ideals  _ are what got you into this mess in the first place. This isn’t black and white.”

“But what if I deserve to go to —”

“To what, to jail? They don’t send people you — like us — to  _ regular prison,  _ Trish. They send people like us to the Raft. And Captain America and his jailbreak buddies aside, no one comes back from there.”

Trish feels for the first time like she can feel the darkness inside her, the rot, the thing that makes Erik sick. “Maybe… maybe that’s where I should be.”

“Trish. Look at me.”

She does, and it’s one of those rare moments where Jessica is holding nothing back, keeping nothing close to the chest, and it almosts takes Trish’s breath away.

“You went through something horrible. Something no one should ever have to go through. Something —”

“Something that I put you through, too.” Trish’s voice breaks as she says it, and she wonders how gossiping about Luke Cage turned into one of the hardest conversations she’s ever had.

“Hey. No. Not the same thing. It’s not.”

Trish spent so long thinking she was  _ good.  _ But when she looks into Jessica’s bloodshot, moss-green eyes, she sees goodness personified, in all its scarred beauty. “But…” Trish begins.

“What you  _ deserve  _ is not to go spend the rest of your life inside an unregulated super-prison. What you  _ deserve  _ is a second chance.”

Trish is crying in earnest now. She’s been doing it more lately. She guesses it’s part of the  _ normal grieving process,  _ or whatever. 

Jessica rubs a hand across her back, and Trish feels wildly undeserving of this simple comfort. “The only thing that should be aging at sea is this...fucking ridiculous whiskey. Not _ you. _ ” 

Trish can’t help herself — she laughs at that, though through the crying jag it comes out sounding like a weird sob. Jess guides her to the incongruous Ikea sofa and wraps a protective arm around her, and Trish lets her head fall against her friend’s shoulder, wondering vaguely if tears can ruin leather. The stay like that for who knows how long, Trish incoherent with releasing everything she’s been holding in. She’d told Jessica she needed a way to channel her anger, but she realizes that, until now, she’s given no quarter to her sadness. 

“Why?” Trish finally manages to get out, extricating herself from Jess. “Why do you keep giving me chances? Why do you never give up on me? After all that I’ve done?”

Jess takes Trish’s face in her hands and wipes away a tear with one callused thumb. “You know why.”

“I don’t,” Trish says. “I really don’t.”

And then Jessica Jones is kissing her, not like it’s the first time, but like it’s the thousandth time, because it is, even if it’s been years and years. Trish is pretty sure they both know it’s a bad idea, but they live in a world that offers no easy definitions of goodness, and on the scale of bad ideas Trish could be acting on, this one is actually pretty great. Jess’s mouth tastes like Jefferson’s Ocean and her leather jacket creaks where it presses against Trish’s skin, and she can’t believe they’ve been circling around each other for this long before arriving back here.

“I don’t deserve you,” Trish says when they finally break apart, forehead resting against Jess’s.

Jessica pulls in a labored breath. “I spent a lotta years telling myself the same thing about you, so… Guess we’re even.”

“Guess so,” Trish responds, so tired of fighting it. So tired of  _ fighting. _ She’s a woman of vast ambition and drive, both of which have led her wildly astray more than once. But when she thinks about it, when she meets Jessica’s eyes, so close to her own, catches the familiar scent of her, she knows that when it comes down to it, all she really needs is here, right here, so small and strong in her arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“It’s funny how you always remember  
>  And we've both done it all a hundred times before  
> It's funny how I still forgot  
> It would be a hundred times easier  
> If we were young again  
> But as it is  
> And it is  
> We’re just two slow dancers, last ones out”  
> — Mitski, “Two Slow Dancers”_


	15. How About That

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, gang — the last chapter. Thank you all for coming along on this journey with me. I truly never expected this story to be this long, but, well, these crazy kids needed a lot of time to work through their shit, and after all the show put them through, I thought the least I could do was give it to them.

“Whoops,” Jessica murmurs. 

It’s still snowing, an hour later, collecting in frothy clumps against the windowpanes below the loft, making the night feel muffled and dreamlike and impossibly soft, softer than any night either of them have had in their whole jagged lives.

“ _Whoops?_ ” Trish prompts, her breath a warm ghost against Jessica’s bare shoulder. They’re lying face to face in Trish’s bed, spent, legs tangled together beneath the sheets, bodies warm despite the chill of the poorly insulated apartment.

“Didn’t mean to do that,” Jess says, her voice barely above a whisper, feeling that if she speaks any louder, this fragile snow-globe moment might shatter, leaving her in the wreckage, alone or worse.

“Which part?” Trish says. Her face is so close and so open, a breath away, blue in the city dark.

“Any of it,” Jess replies.

“Oh.” Trish brushes her fingertip down the ski slope of Jess’s nose, and her eyes fall closed at the contact. “Do you regret it?” 

“No.” The answer slips out before she has time to second-guess herself. “Do you?”

“No.”

She opens her eyes again to see a real smile on Trish’s face, and feels one grow on her own. “Well, how about that.”

.

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..

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…….

…………

…………….

Erik Gelden doesn’t know much for sure. He knows just the right temperature to sear a burger so it melts on your tongue, he knows how much whiskey it takes to drown a headache, and he knows that, in spite of his “gift,” if you want to call it that, he’s not much use in this lousy world.

He also knows when he’s wrong.

Something he never told Jessica about — partly because he lacked the words to express it, and partly because he didn’t think she’d appreciate hearing it, at least not from him — is the _other_ factor that goes into the way his body reads people. He can’t quite put his finger on it, this other thing. It has little to do with what a person has or hasn’t done, who they have or haven’t killed or maimed or royally screwed over. 

It’s not about what they’ve taken away, but what they’re _giving out._ It’s about their connections to the world and other people. It’s about, for lack of a more scientific term, _love._

Someone can be a grade-D, bottom-shelf piece of shit, but if they care about someone else, deeply and sincerely, in a way that doesn’t seek to devour or control, that kicks the headache factor way down. And if that caring is reciprocated, that’s just fuckin’ Alka-Seltzer. 

It’s late January, the blandest time of year, and Erik’s just ducked out of a bar after drink number four to go to… Well, hell, probably another bar. He initially registers the woman walking out of the coffee shop across the street not because of any conscious recognition or even by the twinge of a migraine, but by the sudden tug and swoop in his heart when he sees a familiar long, black mane of hair caught by a gust of wind whirling down the canyon of Tenth Avenue. It’s her, and he hasn’t seen her in months, and she’s so beautiful and he _missed_ her, and _Christ_ he hopes she doesn’t see him.

He’s frozen in place, blocking the sidewalk like a boulder in a stream, as she pulls her phone out of her pocket with one fingerless-gloved hand and looks down at the screen, leaning against the window and scrolling. She doesn’t see him, but he could, he _should,_ go talk to her. Shouldn’t he? Couldn’t he? 

He shouldn’t. 

He could, though.

Just then, a passer-by by shoulder-checks him and he realizes he’s holding up pedestrian traffic like the most basic goddamn tourist, and he sees the walk signal and legs it across the street before he can second-guess himself. And then he’s half a block away from her, can feel the familiar balm of her presence like a cool compress against his forehead, when the door of the coffee shop opens again and she turns away.

And then he stops in his tracks a second time, because it’s _her,_ carrying a pair of to-go cups, wearing a long white overcoat and blond hair swept into a neat bun.

Erik braces for the headache he knows is coming — possibly a nosebleed if he gets any closer — and his hand has already flown to his brow before he realizes the pain isn’t coming. He’s already more than a few drinks in, but he has enough sense to sidestep and duck behind a traffic pole to take in the pair of them, and this brand new information his body is giving him, from a safe vantage point.

Trish grins when she sees Jessica, and Jessica takes one of the cups from her and barely leans forward to plant a soft kiss on Trish’s lips, and there it is, fizzing up his spine and cooling the fire that’s always burning behind his eyeballs: _Alka-Seltzer._

And in that moment, he knows — _knows_ — that he was wrong about Trish Walker, and about a lot of things. Maybe people can get better after they’ve gotten worse, and maybe not every slope is a downward one, and maybe there’s something in this rotten and rotting world that’s a little less than grace but a lot more than nothing.

Jessica takes a sip from her cup and scrunches up her face (too much sugar, he guesses), and Trish just laughs and trades cups with her. Jessica links their hands together, and they turn away from him and walk unhurriedly up the avenue, the early winter sunset spilling down 46th Street and dousing the pair of them — one in black, one in white — in honey-colored light.

And he doesn’t follow after them, because he knows when to graciously bow out (or, at least, he’s learning). Because if he, noted human trainwreck Erik Gelden, were ever to shove the big, dumb animal of himself between them, to disturb this fragile, shining thread that stretches from one woman to the other, fine as filigree, tough as razor wire — well, that’d be pretty dicked up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn’t, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay."_  
>  – Emma Forrest, _Your Voice in My Head_


End file.
